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COKRIGHT DEPOSIT. 



MRS. FISKE 




ID BEASTS 



An impression of Mrs. Fiske by Ernest Haskel 



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MRS. FISKE 

HER VIEWS ON ACTORS, ACTING, 

AND THE PROBLEMS 

OF PRODUCTION 



RECORDED BY 

ALEXANDER WOOLCOTT 



WITH PHOTOGRAPHS 




NEW YORK 

THE CENTURY CO. 

1917 



J$t 



Copyright, 1917, by 
The Century Co. 



Published, October, 1917 



/ 

OCT 30 1917 



©GU476826 



CONTENTS 

CHAPTER PAGE 

I An Assault on the Repertory Idea . . 3 

II On Ibsen the Popular 41 

III To the Actor in the Making . . .75 

IV A Theater in Spain 108 

V Going to the Play ....... 145 

VI Postscript • . 185 

VII Marie Augusta Davey 199 



LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS 



PAGE 



An impression of Mrs. Fiske by Ernest Haskel 

Frontispiece"' 

Portrait of Mrs. Fiske 5 * 7 

Mrs. Fiske as Tess 16 / 

Mrs. Fiske as Becky Sharp 26 v ' 

Charles Waldron and Mrs. Fiske in the first scene 
of Edward Sheldon's "The High Road" . . 35 > 

Mrs. Fiske as Hedda 46 ' 

"Mr. Fiske has been my artistic backbone . . ." $y 

A typical page from Mrs. Fiske's prompt copy 
of an Ibsen play 65 

The confession scene from "Erstwhile Susan" . 71' 

Mrs. Fiske as Rebecca West in "Rosmersholm" . 78 

Mrs. Fiske — 1917 91" 

Mrs. Fiske as Gilberti in "Frou-Frou" . . . 102 V 

Salvation Nell 111^ 

Minnie Maddern Fiske 121 

The first act of "Salvation Nell" (1908) . . . 131^ 

Becky Sharp 142^ 



ILLUSTRATIONS 

PAGE 

"Erstwhile Susan" ........... \$\ y 

"When I remember Duse. . . ." . . . . . i6i y 

"Mary of Magdala" 168 v 

Mrs. Fiske as Tess 177^ 

Mrs. Fiske as Hannele . l 9 l 

Mrs. Fiske at four . v . 206 v 

Minnie Maddern at sixteen 211^ 

An early folder 217^ 

Minnie Maddern shortly before her retirement 
from the stage . 2231 



MRS. FISKE 



MRS. FISKE 



AN ASSAULT ON THE REPERTORY IDEA 

TTEDDA G ABLER sat just across the 
JL JL table from me at supper after the play. 
It was all very well for Grant Allen in his 
day to say that Hedda was "nothing more or 
less than the girl we take down to dinner in 
London nineteen times out of twenty." Cer- 
tainly she was something more this time, for 
Tess of the D'Urbervilles — not Hardy's Tess, 
perhaps, but ours — sat there, too. I was at 
supper with Hedda and Tess and Becky 
Sharp, but surely that was Becky's red hair that 
could be glimpsed in the shadow of the big hat 
and voluminous veil. That erect figure, vital, 
alert, indefatigable, eloquently animate, surely 
that was Becky. There was something of 
Becky, also, in the mutinous, gleaming humor, 

3 



MRS. FISKE 

and a little something of Cynthia Karslake, 
stepping forth briskly from the pages of Lang- 
don Mitchell's glittering comedy. Then there 
was my dear friend Mrs. Bumps lead-Leigh^ or 
at least her unmistakable lorgnette, not wielded 
now for the abashed discomfiture of others, but 
flirted and brandished, like the fan and the 
morsel of a handkerchief, just to enforce a few 
of the more fervent gestures — those vivid, ar- 
resting gestures which so emphasize and under- 
score a speech that, when you wish to repeat it in 
black and white, you must needs out-Brisbane 
Brisbane in your desperate recourse to capitals 
or italics. In the utter self-effacement of these 
enthusiasms of opinion, as we talked of the 
theater, there were the accents of great Lona 
Hessel, and in the deep conviction, the all-per- 
suasive conviction, something of Rebecca West 
and Salvation Nell, sweet Nell of old Cherry 
Hill. It was not merely that you could not 
choose but hear: you could not choose but be- 
lieve. She could say "Bosh!" for instance, 
with simply devastating effect. In fact, she 
did. 

"Bosh!*' said Mrs. Fiske, for of course it 
was Mrs. Fiske, "do not talk to me about the 

4 




' 



Portrait of Mrs. Fiske 



THE REPERTORY IDEA 

repertory idea. It is an outworn, needless, im- 
possible, Tiarmful scheme." 

"I gather/ 5 I answered brightly, "that you 
are opposed to repertory." 

"I am, I am indeed. In all my days in the 
theater I have never encountered such a pre- 
posterous will-o'-the-wisp. This, my friend, 
is an age of specialization, and in such an age 
the repertory theater is an anachronism, a ludi- 
crous anachronism." 

"But Mr. Granville Barker — and he is really 
a great man — " 

"Ah, yes," she assented cheerfully, and yet 
with a faintly perceptible undertone of res- 
ervation in her voice. 

"Well, Mr. Barker not only carried out the 
repertory idea in his season at Wallack's, but 
admitted then that he could conceive of no 
other kind of theater." 

"Exactly," said Mrs. Fiske, in triumph. In- 
deed, she quite pounced on Mr. Barker and on 
me. I suspect she had been waiting for us. 
"And let me tell you that nothing more harm- 
ful has happened in the American theater in 
years than the Barker season at Wallack's." 

Harmful? One heard many unkind things 

7 



MRS. FISKE 

said of Mr. Barker at the time, but there never 
had been the suggestion that he worked an evil 
spell. Those who rejoiced over his "Man with 
a Dumb Wife 5 ' never suspected him later of 
doing harm in the theater. 

"Harmful/' said Mrs. Fiske— "harmful 
and pernicious. One play, 'Androcles and the 
Lion,' Mr. Barker produced perfectly. It was 
a beautiful achievement, and what followed 
was all the more tragic because he had already 
shown himself a master of his art. A master. 
He had shown us how splendidly he could shine 
as a producer if only he would be a specialist — 
a specialist like several of our own, though of 
the greatest value to us all because the loftier 
literature of the theater would have no terrors 
for Granville Barker. But he put the same 
company through the paces of a quite different 
play for which it was grotesquely unfitted. 
That is the essence and the evil of the repertory 
idea. He slaughtered 'The Doctor's Di- 
lemma' — slaughtered a capital play before our 
very eyes beyond all hope of a resuscitation in 
this generation." 

In particular, as she recalled that evening, 
Mrs. Fiske saw the beautiful role of the wife 

8 



THE REPERTORY IDEA 

so atrociously played that she wanted to rush 
from the theater and forget that it had ever 
happened. And what specially depressed her 
was the evidence of the very harm she feared 
having its deadly effect on her own ingenuous 
companion, an earnest "student of the drama," 
who was applauding conscientiously at the end 
of each act. 

"Why the applause?" asked Mrs. Fiske, 
coldly, and when her awestruck guest mur- 
mured something about Granville Barker, it 
was more than she could bear. She had told 
me this much when she paused, as if amused 
and a little scandalized by one of her own mem- 
ories. But what her reply had been there is no 
telling now, for she wanted to explain clearly 
just why she felt that Mr. Barker's activities 
had worked "direct mischief." 

"Mr. Barker's unfortunate influence was the 
direct result, you see, of the importance of his 
position, of the fact that he was supposed to 
stand for what was good in the theater. When 
an ordinary manager" — she named one, but the 
reader can fill in to suit himself, for the range 
of choice is large — ''when an ordinary manager 
produces a play badly, even very badly, he 

9 



MRS. FISKE 

works no great harm. He has made no preten- 
sions to what is idealistic in the theater. We 
have not taken him seriously. But Mr. Barker 
is not an ordinary manager. When he opened 
the doors of Wallack's the public was invited 
to come and see something fine and true, some- 
thing representative of the best. We were told 
that here was something at least approaching 
the realization of a certain ideal. We were 
told that we should be safe in regarding the of- 
ferings of the Barker system as offerings in good 
art, things real, vital, progressive; things to set 
the intellectual pace; something like a stand- 
ard, a model, something to measure by. 

"Now, all of us who know the theater know 
that even the most highly intelligent and culti- 
vated people are for the most part mere children 
there. People whose understanding and taste 
in literature, painting, and music are beyond 
question are, for the most part, ignorant of 
what is good or bad art in the theater. This 
is strange, but true; and it always has been 
true. I shall never forget the first time I saw 
Duse in 'La Locandiera.' " Mrs. Fiske's eyes 
shone as they always shine when she names the 
greatest lady of them all. "There, my friend, 

10 



THE REPERTORY IDEA 

was probably the most perfect and utterly beau- 
tiful example of delicate comedy in all the 
world of acting in our day, yet I saw the per- 
formance in the company of a highly cultivated 
woman who was excessively bored and who 
missed completely the marvelous spirit and the 
astounding revelation of technical fluency in 
that matchless performance." 

"But The Doctor's Dilemma/ " I ventured. 

"Why," said Mrs. Fiske, "the public, always 
so easily misled in the theater, had been led 
this time to believe the Barker production good 
art, whereas in truth it was bad art, very bad. 
That several of the parts were beautifully acted 
could not for a moment excuse the fact that, 
considered as a whole, the performance was 
atrocious. Yet how could it be otherwise 
when the two leading parts, Jennifer Dubedat 
and the title role, were completely misrepre- 
sented? Furthermore, entire scenes in the play 
were out of key and out of tempo. Now what 
should we say of an opera in which the leading 
roles were abominably sung and in which whole 
passages were out of key and out of tempo? 
Your audience, trained to music, would im- 
mediately recognize the extraordinary defi- 

11 



MRS. FISKE 

ciency and condemn it. In the case of 'The 
Doctor's Dilemma/ however, the audience, for 
the most part untrained in dramatic criticism, 
accepted as an example of good art the misrep- 
resentation, the mutilation of a splendid play. 
So the mischief was worked, and, because of the 
very conspicuousness of Mr. Barker, ignorance 
and bad taste were encouraged. For Mr. 
Barker was more than an ordinary manager : he 
was a movement. And I have never known a 
'movement' in the theater that did not work 
direct and serious harm. Indeed, I have some- 
times felt that the very people associated with 
various 'uplifting' activities in the theater are 
people who are astoundingly lacking in ideal- 
ism." 

I could not help luxuriating then in the 
thought of certain very vocal persons over- 
hearing that remark. But we were not done 
with Mr. Barker. 

"He was a movement," I prompted. 

"But how many knew he was a movement in 
the wrong direction?" 

There was the point. How many knew? 
We were agreed, then, that all growth in the 
theater is just progress in the recognition of 

12 



THE REPERTORY IDEA 

what is good and what is bad, of what is right 
and what is wrong — the recognition by the 
playgoers, that is, as well as by the workers on 
the other side of the footlights. It is the slow 
upbuilding of a public for good art. 

"So you see, my friend, we have had nothing 
so harmful and pernicious befall our theater in 
years as Granville Barker's season — unless — " 
and here Mrs. Fiske resorted to the whisper 
used by those in imminent danger of being 
shot for treason — "unless it was the New 
Theater." 

This was a leap; and yet it was natural to 
move from the sorry, dismantled Wallack's to 
the sumptuous temple that overlooks Central 
Park from the west, the mausoleum which shel- 
tered at first and for a little time the most am- 
bitious attempt to endow drama ever made in 
America. It is no longer the temple of the 
drama, but the temple of the chorus girl. The 
New Theater has become a music hall. 

"Whatever the fine idealism, the unselfish- 
ness, the splendid and genuine philanthropy 
that launched the New Theater," said Mrs. 
Fiske, "it was headed from the first for ship- 
wreck." 

13 



MRS. FISKE 

"Even had the building been right and the 
people within it right?" 

"Even then," she went on. "There was one 
factor bound to wreck it." 

"And that one factor — " 

"Repertory." 

This is worth underscoring, because there is 
little reason to believe that many of those who 
benevolently launched the New Theater yet 
recognize this diagnosis of the ills of which 
that endeavor perished. It is certain that four 
years after the New Theater closed its doors 
these same men were ready to endow virtually 
the same scheme under the directorship of Mr. 
Barker, the great producer from overseas. It 
is equally certain that even after Mr. Barker's 
first season they were ready to establish him 
here, and it should be kept in mind that this 
project failed of fulfilment for entirely ad- 
ventitious and personal reasons. It would be 
neither tactful nor chivalrous to set these forth 
at this time. Besides, it does not matter. It 
is important to remember only that if Mr. 
Barker is not now the head of a lavishly en- 
dowed theater in New York, it is not because 
of any recognized flaws in his theory of the 




Mrs. Fiske as Tess 



THE REPERTORY IDEA 

theater. And his theory of the theater is 
repertory. That theory is apparently still in 
favor. You are sure to hear it expounded at 
every luncheon given by the Society for the 
Gracious Patronage of the Drama. The very 
word is one to conjure with among all the little 
putterers in the theater. 

They dream of an American Comedie Fran- 
Qaise. They yearn for an institutional play- 
house which shall have a fairly fixed company 
for alternating performances of good plays, 
that shall provide change and freshness and 
much experience for the actor, while it gives 
deserved, but unexpected, longevity to master- 
pieces too frail and precious, perhaps, to fill the 
auditorium eight times a week, and yet well 
worth nursing along in repertory. This was 
the theory of the New Theater; this is Mr. 
Barker's theory of the theater. It is not Mrs. 
Fiske's. 

Her heretical and quite unfashionable senti- 
ments on the subject were expressed over the 
supper-table one snowy evening. It was after 
the performance of "Erstwhile Susan" at a 
theater "somewhere in the United States," and 

17 



MRS. FISKE 

this is only the memory of that conversation. 
From such memories alone — mine and others' 
— is there any prospect of spreading before the 
reader her theory of the theater; for in all the 
years she has worked in it she has written no 
solemn treatises, spoken seldom, given forth 
few, if any, interviews, and, having precious 
little enthusiasm for the past, indulged in no 
reminiscences. This has probably been due to 
no settled policy of stately silence, but rather 
to the overwhelming impulse of evasion every 
time an opportunity has arisen. It has been 
due a little, I imagine, to a feeling that as long 
as she would stage and play a piece, no more 
could be asked of her; a little, too, to her alert 
consciousness of the absurd, her lively horror 
of seeming to take herself too seriously. There 
it is — the deep-seated aversion to appearing in 
any degree oracular. Some time ago, as a mat- 
ter of fact, there had been a vague suggestion 
of a dignified outgiving in which I was to con- 
spire; but by the time I reached the place ap- 
pointed the impulse had passed and left merely 
a disarming, but impenetrable, smile. 

"Who am I, to talk about the theater?" she 
asked that time, quite as though I had suggested 

18 



THE REPERTORY IDEA 

it. "How can I, who in twenty years have 
done upon the stage so much of which I cannot 
approve, speak now as producer, as stage-direc- 
tor, or as actress? Ah, but the saving grace is 
that Mr. Fiske and I have made no pretensions, 
though it is maddeningly true in the theater that 
because you do a thing people will insist on as- 
suming that you vouch for it. Why, I have 
occasionally acted in plays that I could not 
possibly respect — played night after night, too, 
when every night to go to the theater was a 
wearing, aging task. Of course I should have 
refused to go on. I should have. That would 
have been the right thing to do. I should have 
sailed out of the stifling theater, head up and 
free. I thought, to be sure, that each time I 
had good reasons for going on ; but," she added 
ruefully, "I dare say there never is a good rea- 
son for doing wrong." 

"Of course," she resumed, with more cheer- 
fulness, "while it is quite out of the question 
to speak as actress or producer, — I place no 
false estimate on my career in those capacities, 
— I might say something as a dramatic critic. 
I think I am a safe critic, and in my time have 
been a bit of a playgoer myself a But, no," — 

19 



MRS. FISKE 

this with a dismaying access of firmness, — 
"after all, there is nothing to talk about." 

Thus ended that project, and thus, I rather 
imagine, has ended many another earlier pro- 
ject of the same nature. Mrs. Fiske's theory 
of the theater, then, must be gathered largely 
from the memories of unguarded conversations 
— such memories as these. 

So this — one of several I must recall and put 
on paper for the reader — was a conversation 
across a platter that contained, as I remember, 
an omelet, which refection and the repertory 
idea we proceeded to demolish at some length 
and with great gusto. We approved the for- 
mer and were scornful of the latter as an im- 
possible scheme, quite impossible. 

"A lovely dream, perhaps?" 

"A lovely dream that cannot come true. In 
the first place, no single company, even though 
it had years and years in which to prepare, 
could give five entirely different plays and give 
them all properly. By all the laws of chance 
a company suitable for one would destroy the 
other four. It is grandiose presumption to pre- 
tend that a repertory theater can compete ar- 

20 



THE REPERTORY IDEA 

tistically with such a production as Mr. Belasco 
could make with a specially selected cast, such 
a production, by the way, as he came close to 
making for 'Marie Odile/ There were only 
two false notes in 'Marie Odile/ For the rest, 
an ideal was realized perfectly. 

"And it is no easy task. Let me tell you 
that only once in twenty years have Mr. Fiske 
and I succeeded in achieving what to me was 
an absolutely perfect performance. Think of 
that — only once in twenty years ! We have, I 
think, several times approached close to the 
ideal, as did Mr. Belasco with 'Marie Odile'; 
but only once has my own personal critical 
sense been completely satisfied in our own per- 
sonal effort. 

"That satisfaction came to me in our first 
production of 'Salvation Nell/ A distin- 
guished critic at the time said that it was 'in- 
credibly' well acted. He was right. I can 
hardly tell you what an effort it represented. 
I cannot begin to tell you how many times Mr. 
Fiske and I virtually dismissed an entire com- 
pany; how over and over again members of the 
cast were weeded out and others engaged ; how 
over and over again we would start with an al- 

21 



MRS. FISKE 

most entirely new company, until every part, 
from Holbrook Blinn's down to the very tiniest, 
was perfectly realized; how much there was of 
private rehearsal; of the virtual opening of a 
dramatic conservatory; how much of the most 
exquisite care before 'Salvation Nell' was 
ready." 

So you may guess that when Mrs. Fiske is 
out in the provinces and sees a play advertised 
to be given "with the original cast," she is a 
little taken aback. What? They have made 
no improvements since they began? And then, 
encouraged by the suspicion that the poster is 
mendacious from sheer force of habit, she 
throws off her fears and goes to the play. 

"I think," she went on, "that 'Erstwhile 
Susan' is excellently done, and that we had 
fairly approached perfection in 'Leah Kleschna' 
and 'The New York Idea/ So far as the im- 
pression upon the public and the critics went, 
these last two were far more important achieve- 
ments than 'Salvation Nell.' " 

"At least," I agreed, "the impression of the 
acting in 'Kleschna' and the Mitchell comedy 
was far more brilliant. Certainly it was 

22 



THE REPERTORY IDEA 

praised much more highly than the acting in 
'Salvation Nell/ " 

"Whereas," said Mrs. Fiske, "the truth is 
that in neither of them was the ideal in acting 
realized with such absolute perfection as it was 
in the play by Edward Sheldon. In each there 
was one tiny false note — a note the casual ob- 
server would never hear, that only the most 
astute critic would be aware of. Yet a pro- 
duction is either right or it is not, and for me 
these little false notes spoiled the ideal. The 
ideal was spoiled in 'The New York Idea/ 
where, nevertheless, you had Mr. Arliss playing 
a part that Mr. Mitchell had written expressly 
for him and that therefore fitted him as, in the 
ordinary course of events, he could not hope to 
be fitted again. Mr. Arliss was perfect. There 
was John Mason at his splendid best, and there 
was Marian Lea. Dear me, what weeks and 
months we spent persuading her to return to the 
stage just for this! And yet I should have to 
go far back to recall anything so exquisite in 
high comedy as Marian Lea's performance in 
her husband's glittering play. 

"And by the way/' she added, smiling, "right 

23 



MRS. FISKE 

here is a very pretty illustration of the virtual 
impossibility of safety in this precious repertory 
system you are all so fond of. In The New- 
York Idea' the only false note was sounded by 
an actor whose performance in 'Leah Kleschna' 
had been superb. Repertory, indeed !" 

It was evident by this time that a producer 
must find for every play its own particular cast 
or die in the attempt. But even a company 
miraculously fitted to half a dozen plays would, 
she argued, scarcely be able to give half, let 
alone all, of them in a single season. 

'To play an important new role in one play 
by Ibsen or by any of the great moderns would 
take an actor all of a year," Mrs. Fiske con- 
fessed. "I could not possibly do two in a sea- 
son and do either of them well. And so it is 
with most of the players I know. I remember 
Mr. Arliss saying that it took him six months 
to perfect a part, but I suspect he was under- 
estimating. I remember asking Madame 
Janauschek — there was a great actress, my 
friend, a heroic creature, the last of a race of 
giants — I asked her one day how long she 
needed to master a part, and she, who had had 
her training in the quick changes at the court 

24 



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Mrs. Fiske as Becky Sharp 



THE REPERTORY IDEA 

theater, said that two months was the very least 
she must have. I simply cannot understand the 
hardihood of those who suggest that any com- 
pany should undertake such a staggering pro- 
gram as the repertory advocates invariably 
propose." 

You see, Mrs. Fiske is obdurate. Stories of 
repertory's success in Europe leave her un- 
moved. What may be good for France of Ger- 
many is not necessarily good for us. Perhaps, 
she will admit, it is more feasible in a country 
where a long-developed art sense is stronger 
among the playgoers, who can thereby discard 
what is bad and recognize immediately what is 
good, in a country where the theater itself has 
been subjected for generations to such a shaking- 
down and weeding-out process as we need so 
badly here. 

"We need it, even though we lost ninety per 
cent, of our actors," said Mrs. Fiske, with the 
greatest cheerfulness. "Though, mind you, 
such a weeding-out should not be done too 
hastily." 

And she told then the story of a charming 
genius who once played with her for a little time 
in "Becky Sharp." He never learned any of 

27 



m 



MRS. FISKE 

his lines, but he was entirely honorable about it, 
for by some mysterious system of his own he 
did manage to learn his cues, so that his fellow- 
players were not left stranded in the middle of 
a dialogue. At last it was necessary to give 
him notice, and this was no sooner served than 
he gave a performance so perfected and so strik- 
ing that every audience was thrilled, and Mrs. 
Fiske herself fairly uplifted. And she had al- 
ready engaged another actor for the part! It 
was too desolating. 

"You see, we must not weed out too hastily. 
For example, they say William Gillette was 
quite too impossible when he first went upon the 
stage, yet it would have been a pity to have 
weeded him out." 

Unabashed by the Continent, Mrs. Fiske will 
certainly not quail when the repertory enthusiast 
brandishes the Metropolitan to confound her. 
What may work well enough in the opera-house 
will not settle the more subtle and complex 
problems of the theater. 

"Besides," she said, "there they have all the 
greatest artists of the world under one roof. I 
admit it might be rather interesting to see a 
repertory theater that boasted a Duse and an 

28 



THE REPERTORY IDEA 

Irving and a Terry and a Rejane and a few 
more like them all in one great, flexible com- 
pany. This company the opera has. They 
seem willing enough to endow opera on such a 
scale, but I take it that the most multitudinous 
Maecenas — all Wall Street, no less — would not 
attempt to endow such a theater" 

And, as I learned, it does no good to remind 
her of the repertory ventures with which she 
herself has been identified, notably, of course, 
in the first season of her return to the stage as 
Mrs. Fiske and then, years before, when she 
was a child in the middle West and would be 
drafted for the children's roles if some such 
"visiting 55 star as John McCullough or Mary 
Anderson passed that way. 

"And they thought nothing of giving a differ- 
ent play every night, 55 she said, with a smile 
for the days of labor so titanic that if you even 
suggested the like to one of our actors to-day 
he would swoon. "But that was long ago, and 
I told you that repertory was outworn. Be- 
sides, I 'm not aware any one ever pretended it 
was the best way, the artistic way. Then it 
was the only possible way. And, in any case," 
she added with perfect finality, "you can 

29 



MRS. FISKE 

scarcely expect me to approve my own career in 
the theater. I do not approve it." 

Nor was she moved by a reminder that Mr. 
Irving and Miss Terry, or, for that matter, that 
Duse, had brought repertories of plays to this 
country. 

"It is true," she said, "that Henry Irving 
would bring us a large repertory of noble plays, 
almost perfectly produced. But not one of 
them at first had its place in a repertory. Each 
was a highly specialized offering, each the re- 
sult of months of concentrated thought, study, 
preparation, and development. 

"Perhaps," she admitted, "your repertory 
theater would nurse along a fragile piece, but 
its effect on strong plays would be disastrous. 
Even if by some miracle they were played well, 
they would be played intermittently and com- 
paratively seldom. Comparatively few would 
see them, and this process simply burns up the 
literature of the stage. Suppose that 'The 
Great Divide 5 had been done at the New 
Theater. Think of that !" 

What I did think of was Charles Frohman's 
gallant experiment with the repertory idea in 
London, when, abetted by the same Granville 

30 



THE REPERTORY IDEA 

Barker, he sank a king's ransom in the pro- 
duction of many fine plays, among them "Jus- 
tice," which, for all its silken playing, knew 
only a dozen performances and did not come 
into its own until a specialist gave Galsworthy 
his due five years later in New York. 

"But badly played," Mrs. Fiske resumed, 
after this interruption, "such plays are simply 
slaughtered. Like the poor 'Doctor's Di- 
lemma.' Or like Masefield's Tragedy of Nan,' 
which demands the most subtle treatment, and 
Arnold Bennett's 'The Honeymoon,' each of 
which the Stage Society killed in a single night. 
That exquisite little play of Mr. Bennett's had 
been close to my heart for a long time. For 
years Mr. Fiske and I searched in vain for just 
the right actor to play the part of the aviator. 
We searched for him in this country and we 
searched for him in England. When we found 
him, it was our intention to secure the play, if 
possible, and to produce it. But we never 
found the ideal actor for the part. And so a 
plan which I had greatly cherished had to be 
abandoned. 

"But the Stage Society had no hesitancy in 
the matter of casting this delicate play — this 

31 



MRS. FISKE 

play that could be crushed as easily as the wings 
of a butterfly. Thus was the lovely 'Honey- 
moon' killed and thrown away." 

So a comedy that, with a brilliant Belasco 
production, might have flourished like the green 
bay-tree or 'The Boomerang," was simply de- 
stroyed. Yet it did seem a little unfair to the 
already sorely beset repertory idea to make it 
shoulder the sins of such audible, but vague and 
ineffectual, idealists as the Stage Society and 
its like. 

"Perhaps it is unfair," Mrs. Fiske agreed re- 
luctantly, "and yet it seems all of a piece to 
me. The itch of the vague idealist to get his, 
or more often her^ hands on the theater, some- 
times, I suspect, just the long- thwarted ambition 
of the stage-struck girl to get behind the scenes, 
invariably takes the form of a demand for reper- 
tory. It always has taken this form, even back 
to the days when I was a girl and there was a 
great clatter about the Theater of Arts and 
Letters. The uplift societies are never content 
to destroy one play; they must needs destroy 
three or four. 

"These enthusiasts all cry out the while for 
the perfect thing in the theater, quite regardless 

32 



THE REPERTORY IDEA 

of the fact that we have had it often, or at least 
come as close to it from time to time as in my 
opinion we ever shall. Mr. Palmer, Mr. Daly, 
Mr. Belasco many times closely approached the 
ideal. And what an illumination and inspi- 
ration such an approach is ! How it uplifts and 
educates ! To the actor in the making what a 
solid helfi it is! The opportunity merely to 
witness one perfect performance would give him 
more of strength and guidance than would his 
own playing of twenty parts in more or less im- 
perfect productions. He could see such per- 
formances at such a national theater as we might 
have if — but that is another story. We '11 
come back to it one of these days. 

"And, after all, the disposition of the more 
clamorous repertory enthusiasts to ignore these 
achievements is merely irritating. My real 
objection to their theory of the theater is that 
it is destructive of valuable theatrical property. 
That is it: it destroys property." 

Whereupon I retreated hastily, and attempted 
to consolidate my position on that last firm 
stand the defenders of repertory always take, 
the good of the actor. Now, one who will 
admit that repertory is unnecessary in such a 

33 



MRS. FISKE 

city as New York, which, with its great variety 
of plays, is itself a repertory theater; who will 
admit that no one company can hope to embody 
perfectly the marked divergences of several 
modern plays; that that author is best served 
who has the whole wide world to draw on for 
each specialized cast, will still cling to the 
scheme in behalf of the actor. Winthrop Ames, 
emerging from the wreck of the New Theater, 
can see this one excuse for repertory, the actor's 
interest. Does it not stunt the actor's growth 
to play one role month after month, maybe year 
after year? Surely you remember that moment 
in the recent Follies where the bogus Jane 
Cowl chokes back her sobs long enough to give 
voice to the actor's lament: "They gave me a 
crying part in 'Within the Law,' and oh, my 
God, it was a success!" For freshness, change, 
experience, does not the actor need the shifting 
programs of the repertory theater? Else how 
shall we train the Duses, the Irvings, the Mrs. 
Fiskes, the Forbes-Robertsons of 1930? 

"Is it not necessary, then, for the training of 
the actor?" 

Mrs. Fiske laughed immoderately. 

"To educate the actor at the expense of the 

34 




Charles Waldron and Mrs. Fiske in the first scene of Edward Shel- 
don's "The High Road" 



THE REPERTORY IDEA 

public and dramatic literature!" she exclaimed 
in great amusement. "Bless you, that will 
never do. It might be fairly safe if they would 
say: 'Here we are giving imperfect and inade- 
quate performances. They are not good art, 
but they will help train our actors/ Not that 
I am sure it would train them, mind you, and 
I am quite certain it 's a needless extravagance. 
"I do not know who started the precious 
notion that an actor needs half a dozen parts a 
season in order to develop his art. Some very 
lazy fellow, I suspect. If he has one role that 
amounts to anything, that has some substance 
and inspiration, he simply cannot exhaust its 
possibilities in less than a year. He cannot. 
Probably he cannot even play it perfectly for 
the first time before the end of the first season. 
And if his parts are empty and unnourishing, I 
cannot for the life of me see how the mere fact 
of having six instead of one in a season will 
avail him anything. Then suppose the director 
is incompetent. Directors usually are, you 
know. And, under incompetent direction, is 
not your actor in the making better off if he 
need play only one part badly rather than six 
parts badly?" 

37 



MRS. FISKE 

Then how is the young actor to be trained? 
Mrs. Fiske is not entirely obdurate against the 
provincial stock companies, and yet she is a 
little afraid of them. They might serve their 
purpose in the young actor's apprenticeship if, 
advised by her, he would keep reminding him- 
self: "This is all wrong, wrong, wrong. I 
cannot play Smith while I am memorizing 
Brown. This does not teach me acting. It 
teaches me tricks. I am getting a certain ease 
and facility, but it is all wrong." 

But will he keep this in mind? Will he not 
rather gain confidence and nothing else? She 
shudders at the consequences which she has seen 
so often. 

"He starts with the firm touch on the wrong 
note, and as he grows more and more confident, 
the touch becomes firmer and firmer. To our 
great dismay, the false step is taken then with 
a new and disconcerting air of sureness and au- 
thority. In all the theater, my friend, there is 
nothing quite so deadly as this firmer and firmer 
touch on the wrong note." 

So suppose he accepts an engagement in New 
York and has just one part that lasts and lasts 
and lasts. I wanted to know about him. 

38 



THE REPERTORY IDEA 

"If at the end of the season he has exhausted 
it," Mrs. Fiske advised, "let him resist all in- 
ducements to continue. And if during that 
first season his part does not stimulate, nourish, 
and tax him, let him study. He may have only 
one role in the theater, but he may have a dozen 
in his room. A violinist will have an immense 
repertory before he makes even his first appear- 
ance in public. A singer's studies are never 
done, and I am sure that, if you inquired, you 
would find such artists as Melba and Caruso 
still working with their teachers. It should be 
so in the theater. It should be. Our actors 
fret if they have to play one role month after 
month, but that is no proof that they are am- 
bitious. They are lazy. Why should there be 
all this talk of training actors, anyway? If an 
actor is an artist, he will train himself." 

This invoked visions of a deserted Lambs' 
Club and the great player of to-morrow doing 
his present fretting before the mirror in a hall 
bedroom. It provoked a few doubts which I 
desired cleared away. 

"And if he is n't an artist?" 

"Ah, if he is not an artist? Well, in that 
case does it matter much what becomes of him? 

39 



MRS. FISKE 

The sooner he departs from the theater the 
better." 

So we ceased to worry about the wretched 
fellow and abandoned him to his fate. The 
supper was over. 

As we stood outside on the steps the whole 
city was buried in sleet. The trolley-wires 
crackled overhead and in a near-by avenue 
lighted up the sky with a fitful, blue-green 
glare. Mrs. Fiske affected surprise. 

"What, 3 ' she asked, "is Mr. Belasco doing 
over there?' 5 

We were all for going over then to hiss when 
her attention was caught by a horse that had 
fallen between the shafts in the slippery street. 
A lumbering driver was trying to kick him to 
his feet. This was too much. Mr. Belasco 
was forgotten, and from the curb the voice of 
Becky Sharp made protest. The driver de- 
sisted, and gravely studied her from a distance. 
Then he spoke. 

"Mind your own business — lady," he said, 
and at this baffling blend of manners Mrs. Fiske 
laughed all the way home. 



4° 



II 

ON IBSEN THE POPULAR 

WE talked of many things, Mrs. Fiske 
and I, as we sat at tea on a wide ve- 
randa one afternoon last Summer. It looked 
out lazily across a sunlit valley, the coziest 
valley in New Jersey. A huge dog that lay 
sprawled at her feet was unspeakably bored by 
the proceedings. He was a recruit from the 
Bide-a-wee Home, this fellow, a Great Dane 
with just enough of other strains in his blood 
to remind him that (like the Danes at Mr. 
Wopsle's Elsinore) he had but recently come up 
from the people. It kept him modest, anxious 
to please, polite. So Zak rarely interrupted, 
save when, at times, he would suggestively ex- 
tract his rubber ball from the pocket of her 
knitted jacket and thus artfully invite her to a 
mad game on the lawn. 

We talked of many things — of Duse and St. 
Teresa and Eva Booth and Ibsen. When we 
were speaking casually and quite idly of Ibsen, 

41 



MRS. FISKE 

I chanced to voice the prevailing idea that, even 
with the least popular of his plays, she had al- 
ways had, at all events, the satisfaction of a 
great succes d'estime. I could have told merely 
by the way her extraordinarily eloquent fan 
came into play at that moment that the con- 
versation was no longer idle. 

''Succes d'estiine!" she exclaimed with fine 
scorn. "Stuff and nonsense ! Stuff, my friend, 
and nonsense." 

And we were off. 

"I have always been embarrassed by the ap- 
parently general disposition to speak of our 
many seasons with Isben as an heroic adventure, 
— as a series of heroic adventures, just as 
though we had suffered all the woes of pioneers 
in carrying his plays to the uttermost reaches of 
the continent. This is a charming light to cast 
upon us, but it is quite unfair to a great genius 
who has given us money as well as inexhaustible 
inspiration. It is unfair to Ibsen. I was really 
quite taken aback not long ago when the editor 
of a Western paper wrote of the fortune we had 
lost in introducing the Norwegian to America. 
I wish I knew some way to shatter forever this 
monstrous idea. Save for the first season of C A 

42 



ON IBSEN THE POPULAR 

Doll's House/ many years ago, our Ibsen sea- 
sons have invariably been profitable. Now and 
then, it is true, the engagement of an Ibsen play 
in this city or that would be unprofitable, but 
never, since the first, have we known an un- 
profitable Ibsen year. 

"When I listen, as I have so often had to 
listen, to the ill-considered comments of the un- 
thinking and the uninformed, when I listen to 
airily expressed opinions based on no real 
knowledge of Ibsen's history in this country, no 
real understanding whatever, I am silent, but I 
like to recall a certain final matinee of £ Ros- 
mersholm' at the huge Grand Opera House in 
Chicago, when the audience crowded the theater 
from pit to dome, when the stairways were 
literally packed with people standing, and when 
every space in the aisles was filled with chairs, 
for at that time chairs were allowed in the aisles. 
And I like to remember the quality of that great 
audience. It was the sort of audience one 
would find at a symphony concert, an audience 
silent and absorbed, an overwhelming rebuke 
to the flippant scoffers who are ignorant of the 
ever-increasing power of the great theater 
iconoclast." 

43 



MRS. FISKE 

And so, quite by accident, I discovered that, 
just as you have only to whisper Chatter ton's 
old heresy, ' 'Shakespeare spells ruin," to move 
William Winter to the immediate composition 
of three impassioned articles, so you have only 
to question the breadth of Ibsen's appeal to 
bring Mrs. Fiske rallying to his defense. Then 
she, who has a baffling way of forgetting the 
theater's very existence and would always far 
rather talk of saints or dogs or the breathless 
magic of Adirondack nights, will return to the 
stage. So it happened that that afternoon over 
the tea-cups we went back over many seasons 
— "A Doll's House," "Hedda Gabler," "Ros- 
mersholm" and 'The Pillars of Society." 

"As I say," she explained, " 'A Doll's House' 
in its first season was not profitable; but, then, 
that was my own first season as Mrs. Fiske, and 
it was but one of a number of plays in a finan- 
cially unsuccessful repertory. And even that, 
I suppose, was, from the shrewdest business 
point of view, a sound investment in reputation. 
It was a wise thing to do. But the real 
disaster was predicted by every one for c Ros- 
mersholm.' There was the most somber and 
most complex tragedy of its period. No one 

44 




Mrs. Fiske as Hedda 



ON IBSEN THE POPULAR 

would go to see that, they said, and I am still 
exasperated from time to time by finding evi- 
dences of a hazy notion that it did not prosper. 
'Rosmersholm' was played, and not particu- 
larly well played, either, for one hundred and 
ninety-nine consecutive performances at a profit 
of $40,000. I am never greatly interested in 
figures, but I had the curiosity to make sure of 
these. Of course that is a total of many prof- 
itable weeks and some unprofitable ones and 
of course it is not an overpowering reward for 
a half-season in the theater. In telling you 
that Ibsen may be profitable in a money sense, 
I am not so mad as to say other things may not 
be far more profitable. But $40,000 profit 
scarcely spells ruin. 

"And I tell you all this because it is so dis- 
couraging to the Ibsen enthusiasts to have the 
baseless, the false idea persist that he and the 
box-office are at odds. Sensibly projected in 
the theater — " 

"Instead," I suggested, "of being played by 
strange people at still stranger matinees — " 

"Of course. Rightly projected in the thea- 
ter, Ibsen always has paid and always will. 
And that is worth shouting from the housetops, 

47 



MRS. FISKE 

because sensibly and rightly projected in the 
theater, the fine thing always does pay. Oh, I 
have no patience with those who descend upon 
a great play, produce it without understanding, 
and then, because disaster overtakes it, throw up 
their hands and say there is no public for fine 
art. How absurd ! In New York alone there 
are two unversities, a college or two, and no end 
of schools. What more responsive public could 
our producers ask? But let us remember that 
the greater the play, the more carefully must it 
be directed and acted, and that for every pro- 
duction in the theater there is a psychologically 
right moment. Move wisely in these things, 
and the public will not fail." 

For many false but wide-spread impressions 
of Ibsen we were inclined to blame somewhat 
the reams of nonsense that have been written 
and rewritten about him, the innumerable little 
essays on his gloom. 

"And none at all on his warmth, his gaiety, 
his infinite humanity," said Mrs. Fiske, her eyes 
sparkling. "When will the real book of Ibsen 
criticism find its way to the shelf? How can 
we persuade people to turn back to the plays 
and re-read them for the color, the romance, the 

4 8 



ON IBSEN THE POPULAR 

life there is in them? Where in all the world 
of modern drama, for instance, is there a comedy 
so buoyant, so dazzlingly joyous as 'An Enemy 
of the People' ?" 

"They say he is parochial," I ventured. 

"Let them say. They said it of Hedda, but 
that poor, empty, little Norwegian neurotic has 
been recognized all over the world. The 
trouble with Hedda is not that she is parochial, 
but that she is poor and empty. She was fasci- 
nating to play, and I suppose that every actress 
goes through the phase of being especially at- 
tracted by such characters, a part of the phase 
when the eagerness to 'study life' takes the form 
of an interest in the eccentric, abnormal, dis- 
torted — the perverted aspects of life. As a role 
Hedda is a marvelous portrait; as a person she 
is empty. After all, the empty evil, selfish 
persons are not worth our time — either yours or 
mine — in the theater any more than in life. 
They do not matter. They do not count. 
They are enormously unimportant. On the 
highway of life the Hedda G abler s are just so 
much impedimenta" 

"Do you recall," I inquired, "that that is the 
very word Caesar used for 'baggage' ?" 

49 



MRS. FISKE 

Whereat Mrs. Fiske smiled so approvingly 
that I knew poor Hedda would be "impedi- 
menta" to the end of the chapter. 

"But she is universal/ 5 said Mrs. Fiske, sud- 
denly remembering that some one had dared to 
call Ibsen parochial. "She was recognized all 
over the world. London saw her at every din- 
ner-table, and I have watched a great audito- 
rium in the far West — a place as large as our 
Metropolitan — held enthralled by that bril- 
liant comedy." 

"Which I myself have seen played as 
tragedy." 

"Of course you have," she answered in 
triumph. "And that is precisely the trouble. 
When you think how shockingly Ibsen has been 
misinterpreted and mangled, it is scarcely sur- 
prising that there are not a dozen of his plays 
occupying theaters in New York at this time. 
It is only surprising he has lived to tell the 
tale. Small wonder he has been roundly 
abused." 

And I mentioned one performance of "John 
Gabriel Borkmann" in which only the central 
figure was adequately played and which moved 
one of the newspaper scribes to an outburst 

50 



ON IBSEN THE POPULAR 

against, not the players, but against Ibsen as 
the "sick man of the theater." 

' "Exactly," said Mrs. Fiske. "And so it has 
always gone. Ibsen's plays are too majestic 
and too complex to be so maltreated. To read 
'Borkmann' in the light of some knowledge of 
life is to marvel at the blending of human in- 
sight and poetic feeling. How beautiful, how 
wonderful is that last walk with Ella through 
the mists ! But played without understanding, 
this and the others are less than nothing at all. 
Yet with the published texts in every book- 
store, there is no excuse for any of us blaming 
the outrage on Ibsen. We would attend a 
high-school orchestra's performance of a Wag- 
nerian score and blame the result on Wagner. 
Or would we? We would have once." 

And we paused to recall how curiously alike 
had been the advent and development of these 
two giants as irresistible forces. 

"It was not so very long ago," said Mrs. 
Fiske, with great satisfaction, "that a goodly 
number of well-meaning people dismissed 
Wagner with tolerant smiles. There is a 
goodly number of the same sort of people who 
still wave Ibsen away. Extraordinary ques- 

51 



MRS. FISKE 

tions are still asked with regard to him. The 
same sort of dazing questions, I suppose, were 
once asked about Wagner. I myself have been 
asked, c Why do you like Ibsen?' And to such 
a question, after the first staggering moment, 
one perhaps finds voice to ask in return, 'Why 
do you like the ocean? 5 Or, 'Why do you like 
a sunrise above the mountain peak?' Or, pos- 
sibly, 'What do you find interesting in Ni- 
agara?' 

"But, then, the key is given in those delight- 
ful letters after 'An Enemy of the People/ 
You remember Ibsen admitted there that his ab- 
horred 'compact majority' eventually gathered 
and stood behind each of his drama messages; 
but the trouble was that by the time it did 
arrive he himself was away on ahead— some- 
where else." 

And we went back with considerable enjoy- 
ment to the days when Ibsen was a new thing 
outside Germany and his own Scandinavia, 
when his influence had not yet transformed the 
entire theater of the Western world, remodeling 
its very architecture, and reaching so far that 
never a pot-boiling playwright in America to- 
day but writes differently than he would have 

52 



ON IBSEN THE POPULAR 

written if Ibsen — or an Ibsen — had not written 
first. Then we moved gaily on to the Manhat- 
tan Theater in the days when the Fiskes first 
assumed control. It seems that on that occa- 
sion, Mr. Fiske consulted one of the most dis- 
tinguished writers on the American theater for 
suggestions as to the plays that might well be 
included in Mrs. Fiske's program. And the 
answer, after making several suggestions, wound 
up by expressing the hope that, at all events, 
they would having nothing to do with "the un- 
speakable Mr. Ibsen." 

And so at the first night of "Hedda Gabler" 
— that brilliant premiere which Mrs. Fiske al- 
ways recalls as literally an ovation for William 
B. Mack and Carlotta Nillson, eleventh-hour 
choices both — there was nothing for the afore- 
said writer to do but to stand in the lobby and 
mutter unprintable nothings about the taste, 
personal appearance, and moral character of 
those who were misguidedly crowding to the 
doors. But what had he wanted her to play? 
The recollection was quite too much for Mrs. 
Fiske. . 

"You '11 never believe me," she said, amid 
her laughter. "But he suggested Adrienne 

53 



MRS. FISKE 

Lecouvreur, Mrs. Haller, and Pauline in 'The 
Lady of Lyons/ " 

A good deal of water has passed under the 
bridge since then, but even when the Fiskes 
came to give "Rosmersholm" there was enough 
lingering heresy to make them want to give that 
most difficult of them all a production so perfect 
that none could miss its meaning or escape its 
spell. 

"I had set my heart on it," she said sadly. 
"It was to have been our great work. I was 
bound that 'Rosmersholm' should be right if we 
had to go to the ends of the earth for our cast. 
Mr. Fiske agreed. I do not know what other 
manager there has been in our time from whom 
I could have had such whole-hearted cooperation 
in the quest of the fine thing. Mr. Fiske has 
been my artistic backbone. His theater knowl- 
edge, taste, and culture, his steadiness, have 
balanced my own carelessness. Without him 
I should have been obliterated long ago. 

"Well, Mr. Fiske and I selected Fuller 
Mellish for Kroll in 'Rosmersholm.' He was 
perfect. For Brendel we wanted Tyrone 
Power, who, because Brendel appears in only 
two scenes, could not recognize the great im- 

54 




'Mr. Fiske has been my artistic backbone . . . with- 
out him I should have been obliterated long ago" 



ON IBSEN THE POPULAR 

portance of the role. That is a way actors have. 
So Mr. Arliss was Brendel. But we had wanted 
Mr. Arliss for Mortensgard, and of course as 
Mortensgard he would have been superb. And 
then there was Rosmer. Spiritual, noble, the 
great idealist, for Rosmer of 'Rosmersholm' we 
had but one choice. It must be Forbes- 
Robertson. I sought Forbes-Robertson. But 
I suspect he thought I was quite mad. I suspect 
he had the British notion that Ibsen should be 
given only on Friday afternoons in January. I 
dare say he could not conceive of a successful 
production of 'Rosmersholm' in the commercial 
theater." 

"It flourished, though " 

"Yes, and it was fairly good. But it was 
not perfect. It was not right. The company 
was composed of fine actors who were, however, 
not all properly cast. So it did not measure up 
to my ideal, and I was not satisfied. It drew, 
as Ibsen always draws, on the middle-class sup- 
port. It packed the balconies — to a great ex- 
tent, I imagine, with Germans and Scandi- 
navians. It pleased the Ibsen enthusiasts; but, 
then, I am not an Ibsen enthusiast." 

This was a little startling. 

57 



MRS. FISKE 

"Or, rather, have not always been/ 5 she 
hastened to add. "For that, you must know 
him thoroughly, and such knowledge comes only 
after an acquaintance of many years. I have 
not always understood him. I might as well 
admit," she said guiltily, "that I once wrote a 
preposterous article on Ibsen the pessimist, 
Ibsen the killjoy, an impulsive, scatter-brained 
article which I would read now with a certain 
detached wonder, feeling as you feel when you 
are confronted with some incredible love-letter 
of long ago. And just when I think it has been 
forgotten, buried forever in the dust of some old 
magazine file, some one like Mr. Huneker, 
whom nothing escapes, is sure to resurrect it 
and twit me good-humoredly." 

That acquaintance— when did it first begin? 

"Years ago," said Mrs. Fiske. "It was 
when I was a young girl and given to playing 
all manner of things all over the country. We 
were all imitating delightful Lotta in those 
days. You would never guess who sent it to 
me. Lawrence Barrett. Not, I think, with 
any idea that I should play it, for I was far too 
young then even for Nora. But here was the 
great, strange play every one was talking about, 

58 



ON IBSEN THE POPULAR 

and it was his kindly thought, I imagine, that I 
should be put in touch with the new ideas. Of 
course it seemed very curious to me, so different 
from everything I had known, so utterly lack- 
ing in all we had been taught to consider im- 
portant in the theater. It was not until later 
that I played Nora — emerged from my retire- 
ment to play it at a benefit at the Empire. 

"No, there was no special ardor of enthusiasm 
then. I came to play the other parts because, 
really, there was nothing else. Shakspere 
was not for me, nor the standard repertory of 
the day. I did act Frou Frou, and I cannot 
begin to tell you how dreadful I was as Frou 
Frou. But I did not play Camille. As a mat- 
ter of fact, I could not." 

There had to be an explanation of this. Mrs. 
Fiske whispered it. 

"I cannot play a love scene," she confessed. 
"I never could." 

So it was from such alternatives that she 
turned to the great Ibsen roles — roles with such 
depths of feeling, such vistas of life as must 
inspire and exact the best from any player any- 
where in the world. 

"And now to play smaller pieces seems a little 

59 



, MRS. FISKE 

petty — like drawing toy trains along little tin 
tracks. No work for a grown-up. And if now 
I speak much of Ibsen, it is because he has been 
my inspiration, because I have found in his 
plays that life-sized work that other players 
tell us they have found in the plays of Shak- 
spere." 

Life-sized work. We thought of Irving fix- 
ing twenty years as a decent minimum of time 
in which a man of talent could be expected to 
"present to the public a series of characters 
acted almost to perfection." We spoke of 
Macready standing sadly in his dressing-room 
after his memorable last performance as the 
Prince of Denmark. "Good night, sweet 
Prince, 55 he murmured as he laid aside the velvet 
mantle for good and all, and then, turning to 
his friend, exclaimed: "Ah, I am just begin- 
ning to realize the sweetness, the tenderness, the 
gentleness of this dear Hamlet." So we spoke 
of all the years of devotion Shakspere had in- 
spired in the players of yesterday and the day 
before — "inexhaustible inspiration," such in- 
spiration, Mrs. Fiske said, as awaits the 
thoughtful actor in the great roles of Ibsen. 
She found it in Nora and Lona and Hedda and 

60 



ON IBSEN THE POPULAR 

Rebecca West, and in other characters we 
have never seen her play and never shall see 
her play. 

"There are," she said, "such limitless depths 
to be explored. Many a play is like a painted 
backdrop, something to be looked at from the 
front. An Ibsen play is like a black forest, 
something you can enter, something you can 
walk about in. There you can lose yourself: 
you can lose yourself. And once inside," she 
added tenderly, "you find such wonderful 
glades, such beautiful, sunlit places. And what 
makes each one at once so difficult to play and 
so fascinating to study is that Ibsen for the most 
part gives us only the last hours." 

Ibsen gives us only the last hours. It was 
putting in a sentence the distinguishing factor, 
the substance of chapters of Ibsen criticism. 
Here was set forth in a few words the Nor- 
wegian's subtle and vastly complex harmonies 
that weave together a drama of the present and 
a drama of the past. As in certain plays of 
the great Greeks, as in "CEdipus Tyrannus," 
for instance, so in the masterpieces of the great 
modern, you watch the race not in an observa- 
tion train, but from the vantage-point of one 

61 



MRS. FISKE 

posted near the goal. Your first glance into 
one of these forbidding households shows only 
a serene surface. It is the calm before the 
storm — what Mrs. Fiske likes to call "the omi- 
nous calm." Then rapidly as the play unfolds, 
the past overtakes these people. You meet the 
scheming Hedda on the day of her return from 
her wedding trip. In little more than twenty- 
four hours all she has ever been makes her kill 
herself. An ironic story of twenty years' ac- 
cumulation comes to its climax in as many 
hours. You have arrived just in time to wit- 
ness the end. 

"Back of these Ibsen men and women," I 
put in tentatively, "there are dancing shadows 
on the wall that play an accompaniment to 
the unfolding of the play." 

"A nightmare accompaniment," Mrs. Fiske 
assented. "Often he gives us only the last 
hours, and that, my friend, is why, in the study 
of Ibsen, I had to devise what was, for me, a 
new method. To learn what Hedda was r I 
had to imagine all that she had ever been. By 
the keys he provides you can unlock her past. 
He gives us the last hours: we must recreate 
all that have gone before. 

62 



ON IBSEN THE POPULAR 

"It soon dawned on me that studying Hedda 
would mean more than merely memorizing the 
lines. I had a whole summer for the work — 
a summer my cousin and I spent in all the odd 
corners of Europe. And so, at even odder mo- 
ments, in out-of-the-way places, I set my imag- 
ination to the task of recreating the life of 
Hedda Gabler. In my imagination I lived 
the scenes of her girlhood with her father. I 
toyed with the shining pistols — 

"Those pistols that somehow symbolize so 
perfectly the dangers this little coward would 
merely play with," I interrupted. "How 
much he says in how little !" 

Whereupon Mrs. Fiske shook hands with me. 
She is an enthusiast. 

"I staged in my own ghost theater," she went 
on, "her first meeting with Eilert Lovborg — 
Lovborg whom Hedda loved, as so many 
women love, not with her heart, but with her 
nerves. I staged their first meeting and all 
other meetings that packed his mind and hers 
with imperishable memories all the rest of their 
days. I staged them as we sat in funny little 
German chapels or sailed down the Rhine. I 
spent the summer with Hedda Gabler, and when 

63 



MRS. FISKE 

it came time to sail for home I knew her as 
well as I knew myself. There was nothing 
about her I did not know, nothing she could 
do that I could not guess, no genuine play about 
her — Ibsen's or another's — that would not play 
itself without invention. I had lived Hedda 
Gabler." 

"It must have been pleasant for Miss Stev- 
ens, 5 ' I hazarded. 

Mrs. Fiske laughed gaily. 

"Poor Cousin Emily!" she said. "I remem- 
ber how biting she was one afternoon after she 
had been kept waiting an hour outside a little 
Swiss hotel while I was locked in the parlor, 
pacing up and down in the midst of a stormy 
scene with Lovborg. 

"And so," she went on, "if Hedda, and bet- 
ter still, if both Hedda and Lovborg, have been 
studied in this way, the moment in the second 
act when these two come face to face after all 
their years of separation is for each player 
a tremendous moment. To Hedda the very 
sight of Lovborg standing there on the threshold 
of her drawing-room brings a flood of old mem- 
ories crowding close. It must not show on the 
surface. That is not Ibsen's way. There are 

6 4 



act ii.] an ene&y of the people. to 

Mrs Stockmann. 
Why, good heavens, Thomas ! you're surely not 
thinking of — — ? 

Dr. Stockmann. 
What am I not thinking of ? 

Mrs. Stockmann. 
— - — of setting yourself up against your brother, 
I mean. 

Or Stockmann. 
What the devil would you have me do, it not 
stick to what i* right and true ? 

Petra 
Yes, that's what I should like to know ? 

* t Mks. Stockmann. 

$4 ^But it will be of no earthly use. If they won't, 
'they won't, j 





)r. Stockmann. 



kjust wait a while, and you shaTl\ /? j? 
/fight my battles to the end t ' k €l 



tnna 
see whether 1 can' 

Mrs Stockmann. 
Yes, to the end of getting your dismissal ; that ***%$ .. ***4y 
is what will happen. Kh^. */— yJtfjL 

Dr. Stockmann. *tm: ^^ Ac 

Well then, I shall at any rate have done my duty *■#/ 

towards th« public, towards society — 1 who am M H** * 
called an enemy of society ! ^ , * 



Mrs. Stockmann. 
But towards your family, Thomas ? 



Towards i 



at hotm 






L>u y-i,<i think that is doing your duty / 
towards ti»,»>e who are dependent on you? jl,^— ^*+* f^' 

A typical page from Mrs. Fiske's prompt copy of an Ibsen play 



ON IBSEN THE POPULAR 

others — alien spirits — present, and Hedda is 
the personification of fastidious self-control. 
She has sacrificed everything for that. No, it 
may not show on the surface, but if the actress 
has lived through Hedda' s past, and so realized 
her present, that moment is electrical. Her 
blood quickens, her voice deepens, her eyes 
shine. A curious magnetic something passes 
between her and Lovborg. And the playgoer, 
though he has but dimly guessed all that Hedda 
and Lovborg have meant to each other, is 
touched by that current. For him, too, the mo- 
ment is electrical." 

"Taking," I suggested, "its significance, its 
beauty, its dramatic force from all that has gone 
before." 

"From all the untold hours," said Mrs. Fiske. 
"And see how wonderfully it sharpens the bril- 
liant comedy of that scene where Hedda and 
Lovborg are whispering cryptically across the 
photograph-album while the others chatter un- 
consciously about them. Think how signifi- 
cant every tone and glance and gesture become 
if these two have in their mental backgrounds 
those old afternoons when General Gabler 
would fall asleep over his newspaper and he and 

67 



MRS. FISKE 

she would be left to talk together in the old 
parlor. 

"And I must admit," she added, with a twin- 
kle, "that in those recreations, Lovborg was 
sometimes quite unmanageable. He would be- 
have very badly." 

"Like Colonel Newcome" I exclaimed. 

"Not at all like Colonel Newcome. What 
do you mean?" 

"Exactly like," I went on enthusiastically. 
"Do you remember that time when, in the days 
Thackeray was deep in 'The Newcomes,' his 
hostess at breakfast asked him cheerily if he 
had had a good night? A good night! 'How 
could I?' he answered, 'with Colonel Newcome 
making such a fool of himself? 5 'But why do 
you let him?' This, of course, from his be- 
wildered hostess. 'Oh! It was in him to do 
it. He must/ " 

"Thackeray understood," Mrs. Fiske agreed. 
"But I wonder if he really thought the death 
scene — the 'Ad-sum 9 scene — intrinsically beau- 
tiful." 

"I suspect so," I said. "It was the only 
part of the book he could not dictate. He had 
to write that alone. Anyway, Mr. Saintsbury 

68 



ON IBSEN THE POPULAR 

thinks that Lear's is the only death scene that 
surpasses it in literature." 

"Yet is it not so beautiful and so touching 
because of all that has gone before, because of 
all the affection for dear Colonel Newcome you 
have acquired in a thousand pages of sympathy? 
So it is, at least, with the great scenes in Ibsen, 
meaningless, valueless except in the light of 
what has gone before. He gives us the last 
hours. Behind each is a lifetime. 

"And think how valuable is such a method 
of study in a play like 'Rosmersholm,' how im- 
possible for one to play Rebecca until one has 
lived through the years with the dead Beat a, 
Rosmer's wife has already passed on before the 
first curtain rises, but from then on, neverthe- 
less, she plays an intense role. She lives in the 
minds of those at Rosmersholm, in the very 
hearts of those who play the tragedy. 

"And how crucially important it is that the 
Rebecca should have thought out all her past 
with Dr. West! It is the illumination of that 
past which she comes upon unexpectedly in a 
truth let fall by the unconscious Kroll — a truth 
so significant that it shatters her ambitions, 
sends her great house of cards toppling about 

6 9 



MRS. FISKE 

her ears, touches the spring of her confession, 
and brings the tragedy to its swift, inevitable 
conclusion. Now, unless an actress be one of 
those rare artists who can put on and take off 
their emotions like so many bonnets, I do not 
see how she could make this scene intelligible 
unless she had perceived and felt its hidden 
meaning; nor how, having perceived and felt 
it, she could help playing it well. If her own 
response is right, the playgoer will be carried 
along without himself having quite understood 
the reason for her confession. This is curious, 
but it is true. I am sure of it. For, as a mat- 
ter of fact, few have caught the half-revealed 
meaning of that scene between Rebecca and 
KrolL It is one of the inexplicable stenches 
that do rise occasionally from Ibsen's play — 
like another in the otherwise beautiful 'Lady 
from the Sea/ It assailed me so directly that 
for a long time I hesitated to produce 'Rosmers- 
holm' at all. Yet, of all the writers in Amer- 
ica only two seemed to have been aware of it. 
"But if the actress has not searched Rebecca's 
past, the key to the scene is missing. The ac- 
tress must know, and, knowing, her performance 
will take care of itself. Go to the theater well 

7° 






w 



CO 




ON IBSEN THE POPULAR 

versed in the science of acting, and knowing 
thoroughly the person Ibsen has created, and 
you need take no thought of how this is to be 
said or how that is to be indicated. You can 
live the play/ 5 

But with shallower pieces, with characters 
that come meaningless out of nowhere, could 
she follow this method of study? 

"It would be a mountain bringing forth a 
mouse," she admitted; "and yet I suppose that 
now I always try it." 

And it occurred to me that probably that de- 
lightful confession of Erstwhile Susan's in her 
present play — that harrowing return to the 
closed chapter back in the op'ry-house at Cedar 
Center when the faithless Bert Bud saw had de- 
serted her at the altar — had probably crept into 
the comedy during Mrs. Fiske's own quest of 
a background for the lady elocutionist. I tried 
to find out, but she gave only an inscrutable 
smile, expended largely on Zak who was visi- 
bly depressed. 

"If it is a real part in a real play," she said 
sternly. "That is the way to study it." 

At this point Zak, who is always right in a 
matter of manners, rose and stared at me in 

73 



MRS. FISKE 

such an expertly dismissive way that there was 
simply no escaping the suggestion. I started 
to go. 

"And that," I concluded from the steps, "is 
the method of study you would recommend to 
all young players?" 

"Indeed, indeed it is," said Mrs. Fiske, with 
great conviction. "I should urge, I should in- 
spire my students to follow it if ever I had a 
dramatic school." 

A dramatic school, Mrs. Fiske's dramatic 
school. But that is another story — the next, 
in fact. 



74 



Ill 

TO THE ACTOR IN THE MAKING 

IF Mrs. Fiske were ever to take herself so 
seriously as to write a book on the art to 
which she has somewhat begrudgingly given 
the greater part of her life, I am sure she would 
call it "The Science of Acting." Let every 
one else from George Henry Lewes to Henry 
Irving make utterance on "The Art of Acting" ; 
hers would be on the science. 

It was one glittering Sunday afternoon last 
autumn that I attempted to explore the psy- 
chology of that preference. We had been 
strolling through Greenwich Village in quest, 
for some mysterious and unconfided reasons of 
her own, of beautiful fanlights, and quite nat- 
urally we wound up at a small, inconspicuous 
Italian restaurant in Bleecker Street where cer- 
tain wonderful dishes, from the antipasto to 
the zabaglione, may be had by the wise for lit- 
tle. Mrs. Fiske had stressed the word "sci- 
ence" with positive relish. 

75 



MRS. FISKE 

"I like it," she confessed. "I like to remind 
myself that there can be, that there is, a com- 
plete technic of acting. Great acting, of course, 
is a thing of the spirit; in its best estate a con- 
veyance of certain abstract spiritual qualities, 
with the person of the actor as medium. It is 
with this medium our science deals, with its 
slow, patient perfection as an instrument. The 
eternal and immeasurable accident of the thea- 
ter which you call genius, that is a matter of 
the soul. But with every genius I have 
seen — Janauschek, Duse, Irving, Terry — there 
was always the last word in technical profi- 
ciency. The inborn, mysterious something in 
these players can only inspire. It cannot be 
imitated. No school can make a Duse. But 
with such genius as hers has always gone a su- 
preme mastery of the science of acting, a pre- 
cision of performance so satisfying that it con- 
tinually renews our hope and belief that acting 
can be taught. 

"The science of acting," she went on, "is no 
term of mine. I first heard it used by the last 
person in the world you would ever associate 
with such a thought — Ellen Terry. It may be 
difficult to think of her indescribable iridescence 

7 6 




Mrs. Fiske as Rebecca West in "Rosmersholm" 



TO THE ACTOR IN THE MAKING 

in terms of exact technic, yet the first would 
have gone undiscovered without the second." 

Undiscovered? Who shall say, then, how 
many mute and inglorious Duses have passed 
us in the theater unobserved for want of this 
very science? Mrs. Fiske would not say. For 
her own part, she had detected none. 

"As soon as I suspect a fine effect is being 
achieved by accident I lose interest," she con- 
fessed. "I am not interested, you see, in un- 
skilled labor. An accident — that is it. The 
scientific actor is an even worker. Any one may 
achieve on some rare occasion an outburst of 
genuine feeling, a gesture of imperishable 
beauty, a ringing accent of truth ; but your scien- 
tific actor knows how he did it. He can repeat 
it again and again and again. He can be de- 
pended on. Once he has thought out his role 
and found the means to express his thought, he 
can always remember the means. And just as 
Paderewski may play with a different fire on 
different nights, but always strikes the same 
keys, so the skilled actor can use himself as a 
finely keyed instrument and thereon strike what 
notes he will. With due allowance for the 
varying mood and interest, the hundredth per- 

79 



MRS. FISKE 

formance is as good as the first; or, for obvious 
reasons, far better. Genius is the great un- 
known quantity. Technic supplies a constant 
for the problem." 

And really that is all Mrs. Fiske cares about 
in the performances of others. 

"Fluency, flexibility, technic, precision, virtu- 
osity, science — call it what you will. Why 
call it anything? Watch Pavlowa dance, and 
there you have it. She knows her business. 
She has carried this mastery to such perfection 
that there is really no need of watching her at 
all. You know it will be all right. One 
glance at her, and you are sure. On most of 
our players one keeps an apprehensive eye, filled 
with dark suspicions and forebodings — fore- 
bodings based on sad experience. But I told 
Rejane once that a performance of hers would 
no sooner begin than I would feel perfectly free 
to go out of the theater and take a walk. 
I knew she could be trusted. It would be 
all right. There was no need to stay and 
watch/ 5 

"And how did she bear up under that?" I 
asked. 

"She laughed," said Mrs. Fiske, "and was 
80 ' 



TO THE ACTOR IN THE MAKING 

proud, as of course she should have been. 
What greater compliment could have been paid 
her?" 

And it is because of just this enthusiasm for 
the fine precision of performance that Mrs. 
Fiske laments the utter lack in this country of 
anything approaching a national conservatory. 
To the youngster who comes to her hat in hand 
for advice she may talk airily and optimistically 
of "some good dramatic school." 

"And when he reminds me that there is none," 
she said, "what can I tell him? How can I 
deny it? I have half a mind to start one my- 
self. Seriously, I may some day. It is an old 
dream of mine, for while I have never particu- 
larly admired my own acting, I have always 
been successful in teaching others to act. 

"And how can I give him any assurance that 
he will encounter one of the half-dozen scattered 
directors likely to do him more good than harm? 
The young actors are pitched into the sea, poor 
children, and told to sink or swim. Many of 
them swim amazingly well. But how many 
potential Edwin Booths go to the bottom, un- 
chronicled and unsung? Though I suppose," 
she added thoughtfully, "that a real Booth 

8l 



MRS. FISKE 

would somehow make his way. Of course he 
would." 

But surely something could be done. In de- 
fault of a real conservatory and much chance of 
a helpful director, what then? In order to find 
out, I brought from his place at a near-by table 
an ingratiating, but entirely hypothetical, 
youth, made a place for him at ours, and pre- 
sented him as one who was about to go on the 
stage. 

"Here he is," I said, "young, promising, 
eager to learn this science of yours. What have 
you to tell him? What is the first thing to be 
considered?" 

Mrs. Fiske eyed the imaginary new-comer 
critically, affected, with a start, to recognize 
him, and then quite beamed upon him. 

"Dear child," she said, "consider your voice; 
first, last, and always your voice. It is the be- 
ginning and the end of acting. Train that till 
it responds to your thought and purpose with 
absolute precision. Go at once, this very even- 
ing, my child, to some master of the voice, and, 
if need be, spend a whole year with him study- 
ing the art of speech. Learn it now, and prac- 
tise it all your days in the theater." 

82 



TO THE ACTOR IN THE MAKING 

"Pantomime," I suggested, "fencing, rid- 
ing—" 

"All these things, to be sure," she agreed 
with less ardor of conviction; "everything that 
makes for health, everything that makes for the 
fine person. Fresh air, for instance — fresh air, 
though you madden to murderous fury all the 
stuffy people in the coach or room with you. 
But above all, the voice." 

"Mr. Lewes hazards the theory that Shak- 
spere could not have had a good voice," I re- 
minded her. "Everything else that makes the 
great actor we know he had, and yet we never 
heard of him as such." 

"And we would have," Mrs. Fiske approved. 
"It must have been the voice; it must have been. 
One would be tempted to say that with the 
voice good and perfectly trained, our young 
friend here might forget all the rest. It would 
take care of itself," she assured him. "And 
such a nicely calculated science it is ! Just let 
me give you an illustration. You are to utter 
a cry of despair. You could do that? Are 
you sure it would sound perceptibly different 
from the cry of anguish? Do they seem alike? 
They are utterly different. See, this cry of de- 

83 



MRS. FISKE 

spair must drop at the end, the inescapable sug- 
gestion of finality. The cry of anguish need 
not. They are entirely different sounds. And 
so it goes. Does it seem mechanical? Do 
these careful calculations seem belittling? 
They are of the science of acting. Only so can 
you master the instrument. And next your 
imagination. 55 

"What, 55 I asked, "must he do with his im- 
agination? 55 

"Use it, 55 said Mrs. Fiske, with mild sur- 
prise, while the postulant for dramatic honors 
eyed me scornfully. "With his voice perfectly 
trained, he can then go as far as his imagination. 
After all, an actor is exactly as big as his imagi- 
nation. 

"Most of us would put the imagination first 
in the actor's equipment. Miss Terry did, and 
I suppose I should. Knowledge of life, under- 
standing, vision — these, of course, are his 
strength. By these is his stature to be measured 
— by these and his imagination. If I put the 
voice first, it is a little because that is something 
he can easily develop; because it is, after all, 
concerned with the science of acting; and be- 
cause also," she added in a conspirator's stage- 

8 4 



TO THE ACTOR IN THE MAKING 

whisper obviously not intended for the imagi- 
nary ears of our young friend, "he is likely to 
forget its importance, and if we put it first, he 
will remember it longer. The all-important 
thing, then," she concluded, "is the voice." 

I began to chuckle. 

"What," she asked, "are you laughing at?" 

And I confessed to a vision of Mrs. Fiske 
discovering Diderot at his old trick of slipping 
quietly into a rear seat at the theater, covering 
his ears with his hands, and so, for his own 
greater enjoyment, transforming any perform- 
ance into pantomime. 

"What would you have done, 55 I asked, "if 
you had come upon Diderot stopping up his 
ears?" 

"Boxed them, 55 said Mrs. Fiske. "The voice, 
then, and the imagination. And be reflective. 
Think. Does this seem so obvious as to be 
scarcely worth saying? Let me tell you, dear 
child, that an appalling proportion of the young 
players who pass our way cannot have spent 
one really reflective hour since the stage-door 
first closed behind them. I am sure they 
have n 5 t. It would have left some trace. 
Why, the whole world may be the range of the 

85 ' 



MRS. FISKE 

actor's thoughts. I remember how delighted I 
was when I saw Duse quoted somewhere as say- 
ing that in her own art she had found most 
helpful and suggestive her studies in Greek 
architecture. That was so discerning and 
charming a thing to say that I'm afraid she 
did n't say it at all. But she should have. 

"Be reflective, then, and stay away from the 
theater as much as you can. Stay out of the 
theatrical world, out of its petty interests, its 
inbreeding tendencies, its stifling atmosphere, 
its corroding influence. Once become 'theatric- 
alized,' and you are lost, my friend; you are 
lost. 

"There is a young actress I know, one of 
really brilliant promise, who is losing ground 
every year, and I think it is just because she is 
limiting her thoughts to all the infinitesimal 
struggles of the green-room, all the worthless 
gossip of the — dreadful word ! — of the Rial to. 
Imagine a poet occupying his mind with the 
manners and customs of other poets, their plans, 
their methods, their prospects, their personal or 
professional affairs, their successes, their fail- 
ures! Dwell in this artificial world, and you 
will know only the externals of acting. Never 

86 



TO THE ACTOR IN THE MAKING 

once will you have a renewal of inspiration. 

"The actor who lets the dust accumulate on 
his Ibsen, his Shakspere, and his Bible, but 
pores greedily over every little column of the- 
atrical news, is a lost soul. A club arranged so 
that actors can gather together and talk, talk, 
talk about themselves might easily be dangerous 
to the actor in the making. Desert it. Go 
into the streets, into the slums, into the fashion- 
able quarters. Go into the day courts and the 
night courts. Become acquainted with sorrow, 
with many kinds of sorrow. Learn of the 
wonderful heroism of the poor, of the incredible 
generosity of the very poor— a generosity of 
which the rich and the well-to-do have, for the 
most part, not the faintest conception. Go into 
the modest homes, into the out-of-the-way 
corners, into the open country. Go where you 
can find something fresh to bring back to the 
stage. It is as valuable as youth unspoiled, as 
much better than the other thing as a lovely 
complexion is better than anything the rouge- 
pot can achieve. 

"There should be, there must be, a window 
open somewhere, a current of new air ever 
blowing through the theater. I remember how 



MRS. FISKE 

earnestly I wanted to play Hedda Gabler, as 
though she had just driven up to the stage-door 
and had swept in not from the dressing-room, 
but out of the frosty night on to the stage. 
This you cannot do if you are forever jostling 
in the theatrical crowd. There you lose the 
blush of youth, the bloom of character. If as 
author, producer, director, or actor you become 
theatricalized^ you are lost. The chance to do 
the fine thing may pass your way, but it is not 
for you. You cannot do it. You have been 
spoiled. You have spoiled yourself. 

"It is in the irony of things that the theater 
should be the most dangerous place for the 
actor. But, then, after all, the world is the 
worst possible place, the most corrupting place, 
for the human soul. And just as there is no 
escape from the world, which follows us into 
the very heart of the desert, so the actor cannot 
escape the theater. And the actor who is a 
dreamer need not. All of us can only strive 
to remain uncontaminated. In the world we 
must be unworldly; in the theater the actor 
must be untheatrical. 

"Stay by yourself, dear child. When a part 
comes to you, establish your own ideal for it, 

88 



TO THE ACTOR IN THE MAKING 

and, striving for that, let no man born of 
woman, let nothing under the heavens, come 
between it and you. Pay no attention to the 
other actors unless they be real actors. Like 
Jenny Wren, we know their tricks and their 
manners. Unless it is a bitter matter of bread 
and butter, pay no attention, or as little atten- 
tion as possible, to the director, unless he is a 
real director. The chances are that he is wrong. 
The overwhelming chances are that he is 'the- 
atricalized,' doing more harm than good. Do 
not let yourself be disturbed by his funny little 
ideas. Do not be corrupted, then, by the di- 
rector. And above all" — and here Mrs. Fiske 
summoned all her powers of gesture — "above 
all, you must ignore the audience's very ex- 
istence. Above all, ignore the audience." 

I tried to interpret the baffled look in the no- 
longer scornful eyes of our hypothetical visitor. 

"But can't he learn from them?" I protested 
in his behalf. "Can he not perfect his work 
just by studying their pleasure and their re- 
sponse?" 

"If you do that," said Mrs. Fiske, "you are 
lost forever. Then are you doomed indeed. 
Audiences, my friend, are variable, now quick, 

8 9 



MRS. FISKE 

now slow, now cold, now warm. Sometimes 
they are like lovely violins, a beneficent privi- 
lege. Then you may be happy, but you must 
not count on it. An actor who is guided by 
the caprices of those across the footlights is soon 
in chaos. A great artist, a great pianist, say, 
must command the audience; no actor can af- 
ford to let the audience command him. He 
must be able to give as true a performance be- 
fore three frigid persons as before a house 
packed to the brim with good-will. That is 
his business. Otherwise he is a helpless cork 
tossing on the waves. 

"I distrust from long and bitter experience 
the person in the theater who does all his work 
with one eye on the orchestra-circle. I could 
slay with pleasure the low type of stage-director 
who counts his curtain-calls like a gloating 
miser, and who is in the seventh heaven if a 
comic scene "gets more laughs' to-night than it 
did last night. 'Getting laughs/ forsooth! 
How appropriately vulgar! See what an un- 
speakable vernacular that point of view em- 
ploys! How demoralizing to the youth who 
comes to the theater bringing with him the 
priceless gift of his ideals ! 

90 




Mrs. Fiske — 1917 



TO THE ACTOR IN THE MAKING 

"After all, a piece of acting is not only a 
thing of science, but a work of art, something 
to be perfected by the actor according to the 
ideal that is within him — within him. The 
painter does not work with his public at his 
side, the author does not write with his reader 
peering over his shoulder. The great actor 
must have as complete, as splendid an isolation. 
The critic who is within every artist should be 
his only acknowledged audience. 

"Besides, 55 she added, "the audience often 
tells you wrong. I tremble for you if you are 
confirmed in your weakness by popular success. 
Beware of that. Perhaps you have not done 
your best. The audience may forgive you, the 
reviewers may forgive you. Both may be too 
lenient, too indulgent, or they may not know 
what your best really is. Often that is the case. 
But you cannot forgive yourself. You must 
not. It seems to' me that Modjeska once told 
me there was nothing easier in the theater than 
to get applause. Remember that, and beware 
of an ovation. If you have had a great night, 
if they have laughed and applauded and called 
you again and again before the curtain, accept 
their warming kindness gratefully, but on your 

93 



MRS. FISKE 

way home that night, as you value your ar- 
tistic soul, bow your head, look into your heart, 
and ask yourself, 'Did I really play well to- 
night?' Or, better still," — and here I caught 
Mrs. Fiske's eyes twinkling as if she only half 
meant what she was saying, but would say it 
for the young man's good, — "turn to the critic 
within you and ask, 'What was so very wrong 
with my performance to-night?' " 

With which parting admonition we watched 
our young friend betake his thoughtful way 
toward the door and out into the hubbub of 
Bleecker Street. Then we devoted ourselves to 
a most extraordinary confection, the zabaglione 
aforesaid. It had arrived unbidden, as a mat- 
ter of course. Even this could not banish a 
persistent phrase, "You must forget the audi- 
ence's very existence." It lingered in the air 
and brought trooping in a host of old memories 
— old memories of Mrs. Fiske confiding her 
emotions to the back-drop when it was appar- 
ently no part of her intention that those out 
front should catch the exact content of her 
speech, memories of many a critic's comment 
on her diction and many a player's fretful com- 
plaint that sometimes he "could n't hear a word 

94 



TO THE ACTOR IN THE MAKING 

she said." I could not resist singing a bit of 
F. P. A.'s "bit of deathless rhyme. 5 ' 

"Time was, when first that voice I heard, 
Despite my close and tense endeavor, 
When many an important word 

Was lost and gone forever; 
Though, unlike others at the play, 
I never whispered, 'What 5 d she say?' 

"Some words she runstogetherso ; 

Some others are distinctly stated; 
Some cometoof ast and some too slow 

And some are syncopated. 
And yet no voice — I am sincere — 
Exists that I prefer to hear." 

"Charming!" said Mrs. Fiske, vastly pleased. 

And did she defend herself? Not she. 
Quite the reverse. 

"My friend," she confessed, "that was no 
part of a misguided theory of acting; it was 
simply slovenliness. For years I had no ap- 
preciation whatever of the importance of care- 
ful speech. Only of recent years, after some 
preliminary lessons given to me by Victor 
Maurel, have I learned to use my voice. Three 
hours of voice practice every day of the season 
— that, properly, is the actor's chore. He must 
have such practice at least one hour a day. 

95 



MRS. FISKE 

With any less time than that it is absolutely im- 
possible to keep the instrument in proper con- 
dition, absolutely impossible. Without such 
practice the voice will not respond instantly to 
every tone requirement; yet the actor must be 
able to play with his voice as Tetrazzini plays 
with hers. Indeed, he must have more than 
one voice. He must have at least three — three 
complete, registers. You could write a book 
about this long, delicate, mysterious, and inter- 
esting science, a book that every actor should 
study. From it he could evolve his own 
method. Monsieur Maurel taught me how to 
teach myself. The practice followed, and still 
goes on. Only so, and then only in the last few 
years, have I even begun to speak decently in 
the theater. Before that it was monstrous, so 
dreadful that I should not have been allowed 
to act at all. I should have been wiped out. 
And I suspect that, if the American theater had 
been in a state of health, I would have been." 

This confession would in all probability sur- 
prise a good many of Mrs. Fiske's critics as well 
as a good many of her most fervent admirers 
who have, I fancy, been rather flattering them- 
selves that they were merely growing accus- 

9 6 



j 



TO THE ACTOR IN THE MAKING 

tomed to the articulation of a voice, "staccato, 
hurried, nervous, brisk, cascading, intermittent, 
choppy," or who had vaguely accepted an oc- 
casional moment of inaudibility as in some way 
an essential of that kind of acting which has 
inspired many a chapter headed "Restraint." 

"Restraint!" said Mrs. Fiske, a little amused 
at its inevitable recurrence. "I seem to have 
heard that word before. But is it anything 
more than normality in acting, the warning 
from the critic that dwells in the inner con- 
sciousness of every artist? Is it not merely 
good taste controlling the tumult of emotion? 

"There has been a disposition in some 
quarters to speak of it as a modern factor in 
the actor's art, but was it ever better expressed 
than in Hamlet's immortal advice to the 
players? I think not. Perhaps there has been 
more stress upon it in our generation, but that 
was merely because it followed immediately 
upon a generation somewhat given to violent 
hysteria in what they absurdly call emotional 
acting, as if there were any other kind. But 
that was the exception, not the rule, a passing 
storm, gone, I think, for good. 

"It offends us all now; I think it offended 

97 



MIIS, FISKE 

some of us always. But it was something more 
than an offense against taste. The actress who 
used to shake the very theater with her sobs, and 
sometimes — actually, I have seen it — knock 
over the lamp and tear down the curtains in the 
excess of her woe, was a humiliating, degrading 
spectacle. Such acting, the hysterical emotion- 
alism of a day gone by, was ignoble, essentially 
ignoble. Human beings are far better than 
that, less selfish, more gallant. The woman, on 
the stage or off it, who wildly goes to pieces over 
some purely personal, and therefore petty, grief 
of her own is ignoble. 'My head is bloody, but 
unbowed' — there is the ideal. The quivering 
hand, the eyes moist, but the upper lip stiff, the 
brave smile — that is it. The brave smile in the 
face of adversity has more of the stuff of 
tragedy than all the outward emotionalism ever 
ranted, more moving to the reflective mind, 
touching far more readily the human heart than 
all the stage tears ever shed." 

It was probably inevitable that the old 
question of stage suffering — how much does the 
actor really feel?— should arise then. Mrs. 
Fiske warned me not to trust any player's 

9 8 



TO THE ACTOR IN THE MAKING 

analysis of his own psychology, not hers or any 
other's. 

"I have known," I admitted, "one of our 
most tear-stained actresses to give forth gravely 
a long account of how she did it; but I doubt 
if she really knew." 

"Probably not," Mrs. Fiske agreed. "Often 
we 're the last who can really tell how we do 
what we do. I remember Rejane sitting in my 
dressing-room one evening and keeping us all 
in gales of laughter by telling of the long, 
solemn treatises that had been written in Paris 
on the significance of her way of blowing out 
the candle in 'A Doll's House/ She blew out 
half a dozen imaginary candles for us then and 
there, and asked us frankly what there was to 
that. Much to this matter-of-fact French- 
woman's surprise, they had discovered a whole 
philosophy of life and a whole theory of act- 
ing in something she had happened to do un- 
consciously. 

"It is a little that way with all of us. Does 
the actor feel the grief he tries to picture? It 
is different with different players. I should say 
he feels an intense sympathy. Knowledge of 

99 



MRS. FISKE 

life and vision are his stock in trade. Why, if 
you have ever wept over a story or at the play 
you yourself know the feeling and its extent. 
But in his case, in addition to that sympathy, 
the more poignant his expression, the more 
cheering is the approval from the critic within 
him. He may be sobbing his heart out, but, 
such is the dual nature of the actor, at the same 
time he hears the inner voice saying: 'Well 
done to-night ! Well done !' And he is glad. 

"And the intense suffering he may feel in 
the earlier performances becomes a matter of 
memory. He remembers the method, the 
symbols, by which at first he gave it expression. 
He remembers the means, and relying on that 
memory, need not himself feel so keenly. The 
greater the artist, the less keenly need he feel. 
The actor with no science must keep lashing 
his own emotions to get the effect a master 
technician would know how to express with his 
thoughts at the other end of the world. I sup- 
pose Paderewski does play a little better with 
his mind on the composition before him, but so 
skilled a virtuoso can afford to spare his own 
feelings." 

"And you?" I suggested. 
100 




Mrs. Fiske as Gilberti in "Frou-Frou' 



TO THE ACTOR IN THE MAKING 

"Oh, I have found the tragic roles wearing 
beyond my strength. Hannele, Rebecca West, 
Tess — such racking parts as these I shall never 
play again. Hereafter you will see me only in 
comedy. For, let me tell you something," — 
and her voice dropped to a whisper, — "I have 
retired from the stage." 

As I knew perfectly well that she was at that 
very time embarking lightly on something like 
an eighty-weeks' tour of the country, I suppose 
I looked incredulous. 

"That 's because no one ever withdrew so 
modestly. Usually, when an actor retires, the 
world knows it. I have retired, but nobody 
knows it. I am a little tired, and I must hus- 
band my strength. So from now on for me 
only 'play' in the theater. But this question of 
'to feel or not to feel' which actors solemnly 
discuss until they are black in the face, it is all 
set forth here by a man who was not an actor 
at all." 

She extracted then from under my hat on the 
chair beside me a little green volume which I 
had just been re-reading. Obviously she ap- 
proved. It was George Henry Lewes's "On 
Actors and the Art of Acting." Indeed, it must 

103 



MRS. FISKE 

have been some chance reference to this that 
started the whole conversation. 

"Here we have the soundest and most dis- 
cerning treatise on the subject I have ever read, 
the only good one in any language. Every 
actor would agree with it, but few could have 
made so searching an analysis, and fewer still 
could have expressed it in such telling, clarify- 
ing phrases. Some of it is so obvious as to 
seem scarcely worth being said, and yet many 
reams of silly stuff about the stage would never 
have been printed if the writers had had these 
same obvious principles as a groundwork of 
opinion. For all the changing fashions, what 
Lewes wrote forty years ago and more holds 
good to-day. Thus fixed are the laws of 
science. I think," she said, "we '11 have to re- 
name it The Science of Acting/ and use it as a 
text-book for the national conservatory when 
the theater's ship comes in. 

"And see here," she said, turning to the in- 
troduction and reading aloud with tremendous 
solemnity : 

"A change seems coming over the state of the stage, 
and there are signs of a revival of the once splendid 
art of the actor. To effect this revival there must be 

104 



TO THE ACTOR IN THE MAKING 

not only accomplished artists and an eager public; 
there must be a more enlightened public. The critical 
pit, filled with players who were familiar with fine 
acting and had trained judgments, has disappeared. 
In its place there is a mass of amusement seekers, not 
without a nucleus of intelligent spectators, but of this 
nucleus only a small minority has very accurate ideas 
of what constitutes good art." 

"Dear man, 55 said Mrs. Fiske as we gathered 
up our things to depart, "that might have been 
written yesterday or a hundred years ago. In 
fact, I imagine it was. Of course it was. I 
have never known a time when a writer of the 
stage was not either deploring the 'degradation 
of the drama, 5 as Mr. Lewes does here a little 
later, or else descrying on the horizon the 
promise of a wonderful revival. Do you know 
that they were uttering this same lament in ac- 
cents of peculiar melancholy at a time when 
Fielding managed one theater, when Sheridan 
was writing, and when you had only to go 
around the corner to see Kemble or Garrick or 
Mrs. Siddons? 55 

As we strolled up through Washington 
Square Mrs. Fiske became a little troubled 
about her admonitions to the imaginary would- 
be actor. 

105 



MRS. FISKE 

"Of course," she confided to me, "we were a 
little toplofty with that nice young man. For 
his own good we said a great deal about the 
need of ignoring the audience, and so forth. 
When he is a little older he will understand 
that to try to please the audience is to trifle with 
it, if not actually to insult it. He will instinc- 
tively turn for judgment to the far less lenient 
critic within himself. But I wish we had told 
him he must go on the stage with love in his 
heart — always. He must love his fellows back 
of the curtain. He must love even the 'my- 
part' actor, though he die in the attempt. He 
must love the people who in his subconscious- 
ness he knows are 'out there/ He must love 
them all, the dull, tired business man, the 
wearied critic, the fashionably dressed men and 
women who sometimes (not often) talk too 
loud, and thereby betray a lack of breeding and 
intelligence. There are always splendid souls 
'out there/ But most of all he will love the 
boys and girls, the men and women, who sit in 
the cheapest seats, in the very last row of the 
top gallery. They have given more than they 
can afford to come. In the most self-effacing 
spirit of fellowship they are listening to catch 

106 



TO THE ACTOR IN THE MAKING 

every word, watching to miss no slightest 
gesture or expression. To save his life the actor 
cannot help feeling these nearest and dearest. 
He cannot help wishing to do his best for them. 
He cannot help loving them best of all." 



107 



IV 

A THEATER IN SPAIN 

SO nomadic is the existence of the players 
that any one of them who has acted for a 
generation in our theater has been in nearly 
every town and city from Boston to 'Frisco. 
Minnie Maddern Fiske, who made her debut 
without a speaking part for the sufficient reason 
that at the time she had not yet learned to talk 
at all, has in her day traveled all the highways 
and byways of this country. Speak of audi- 
ences to her, and while you in your provincial 
way are thinking of New York, she is quite 
likely to be thinking of Kokomo or El Paso, of 
Calgary up in shivery Alberta, or of Bisbee, too 
near the Mexican border to be entirely happy 
in its mind. In all these art centers she has 
played; for that matter, she has played the 
somber "Rosmersholm" in all of them. In- 
deed, there are no nooks and corners of America 
she has not explored, and precious few where 

108 



A THEATER IN SPAIN 

you could be quite sure of not finding her. 
Nevertheless, it was a little surprising when, 
during a cross-country tramp last summer 
through an abandoned portion of Connecticut, 
I came upon a morsel of a colonial farm-house 
and found Mrs. Fiske surveying me with con- 
siderable amusement from its morsel of a ve- 
randa. 

Here she was, in a pocket of the Nutmeg 
hills, hiding from all the youngsters who want 
to go on the stage and from all the playwrights 
who feel sure her doubt as to the value of their 
works is all that stands between them and un- 
dying fame. Here, beyond reach of the tele- 
phone and the telegraph, she had retreated 
under an assumed name, an outrageously Ger- 
man name, although I doubt if the most in- 
genuous yokel would really have mistaken her 
for a gnddige Frau. The Irish and the Welsh 
in her, the famous red hair, and the lightning 
gestures — all these made prodigious fun of that 
umlaut she had put on for the summer. I was 
suffered to stay to tea, and we were soon par- 
taking of it from an ancient table there on the 
veranda — a veranda dappled by the sunlight, 
which found its way down through the foliage 

109 



MRS. FISKE 

of a somewhat raffish elm that seemed to be 
leaning nonchalantly on the house. We had 
tea and a dish of her own invention,— orange 
marmalade and cream, — a confection of which 
she is even prouder than of her production of 
"Salvation Nell." 

It was something more than forty-five min- 
utes from Broadway, but except for the good 
air and the good quiet, Mrs. Fiske was not 
really out of the theater. Under her hat on the 
chair beside her lay a published play that she 
had been absorbing, and pretty soon we were 
talking of endowed theaters. It was in the air. 
There were fairly audible whispers in New 
York that certain rich men who do for art in 
America what states and cities do for it abroad 
were rallying splendidly from the shock of the 
New Theater's costly collapse and betraying a 
certain restless desire to come forth and endow 
the drama once more. 

"If you had five millions?" I asked curiously. 

"Five millions?" Mrs. Fiske paused with 
her cup in air and meditated. It soon became 
apparent that it would take her only a few 
moments to spend it. "Well," she said, "I 
should give a million to certain humanitarian 

no 





■ 



Salvation Nell 



A THEATER IN SPAIN 

cults. I should turn over a million to Eva 
Booth to spend among the poor she understands 
so well. I should turn over a million to 
Leonore Cauker of Milwaukee, who has taken 
the city's pound on her own shoulders, paying 
for almost all of it out of her own pocket and 
working from six in the morning until mid- 
night. An unusual life for a fragile, beautiful 
girl! Of course I could easily spend the 
other two million in one afternoon in helping 
on the effort to make women see that one of the 
most dreadful, shocking, disheartening sights in 
the world is just the sight of a woman wearing 
furs. The two million, I 'm afraid would be 
a mere drop in the bucket." 

"But the theater," I protested weakly. 

"Not a penny." 

"Ah," I persisted with guile, "but suppose 
you were made sole trustee of a fund of five 
millions to be expended in the endowment of a 
national theater." And then, before she had 
time to embezzle this unblushingly in behalf 
of her non-human friends, I recalled as best I 
could the project E. H. Sothern had sketched 
in the book of his memory. This was his 
idea: 

113 



MRS. FISKE 

A national theater will continue to be a dream un- 
til it is realized on the sane and simple lines of sup- 
plying the standard classic drama, Shakesperian and 
others, to the poor and uneducated at a nominal price. 
Three million dollars would build a national theater 
in Washington. Endow it with an income of an 
hundred thousand a year, and enable it to produce a 
clasic repertoire for the benefit of the multitude at an 
admission fee of from ten to fifty cents, the object 
being to plant broadcast an understanding and love 
for the best in dramatic literature. 

Mrs. Fiske's eyes twinkled mutinously. 

"Broadcast?" she queried doubtfully, and 
then cheering up, she went on: "It might re- 
fine the House of Representatives, might n't it? 
But how would they dare to call it a national 
theater?" 

"Because we 're not really a nation yet?" I 
asked, disconsolate at encountering this old dif- 
ficulty so early in the afternoon, the inevitable 
reflection on our homogeneity. 

"No, I do not mean that. Let's not talk 
about the Civil War and California and 'East 
is East' and all that. In a really fine play the 
twain will meet. Perhaps we are not settled 
enough yet to have a theater of the nation, but 
we can have a theater for the nation. Yet how 
would Mr. So them's project meet that test? I 

114 



A THEATER IN SPAIN 

suppose that most Frenchmen could get to Paris 
once a year or so to the Comedie Frangaise, and 
certainly a theater in the Strand is within reach 
of all the people in little England; but neither 
the New Theater that was nor Mr. Sothern's 
dream playhouse that is to be could be called a 
national theater when most of the people in the 
nation would never see even the outside of it in 
all their days. The national theater must go 
to them. Not a resident company, but the play 
that moves across the country and has its day 
in El Paso as well as its month in New York is 
the natural development, the natural expression, 
of the American theater. Let the founders of 
the national theater remember that it will be 
their task to send not a pale carbon copy of a 
New York success, but an absolutely perfect 
achievement in dramatic art from one end of 
America to the other." Here Mrs. Fiske's hand 
was raised in prophecy. "The national theater, 
my friend, will not be a theater at all, but a 
traveling company." 

We had rather good fun then in organizing 
it over the tea-cups and at no expense what- 
ever. It might, she thought, give two plays a 
year, one classic and one new. It might, for 

"5 



MRS. FISKE 

instance, give "Cymbeline" or "The Wild 
Duck" and also a sparkling new comedy by 
some yet inglorious Sheridan unearthed in a 
hall bedroom in Greenwich Village. It should 
present its year's work, these two plays, for a 
brief engagement in New York, and then set 
forth along the road, coming to each city at the 
same time each year, reaching Philadelphia, say, 
with the first snowfall and San Francisco with 
the first strawberries. It would be the best the 
American stage could do; it would represent the 
highest achievement in dramatic art. It would 
inspire playwrights, enlarge actors, and culti- 
vate taste. It would be a standard, the 
standard, this national theater of ours. And 
how much would it cost? 

"Not a dollar, 5 ' said Mrs. Fiske in triumph, 
"not a penny, nothing at all; it would make 
money." 

I smiled at this, a little at the spectacle of the 
thwarted millionaires, a little at the evidence of 
the true theater woman's instinct toward en- 
dowment — one of distrust. Irving's feeling 
that theatrical enterprise must be carried on as 
a business or fail as art echoes through all con- 
temporary commentary, the deep suspicion that 

116 



A THEATER IN SPAIN 

an unprofitable theater has something radically 
the matter with it. 

"But the most idealistic theater can be self- 
supporting, my friend. Idealistic producing is 
safe. Sensibly projected in the theater, the fine 
thing always does pay and always will. It is 
easiest to speak from our own experience. Mr. 
Fiske and I may be said to have had a fairly 
respectable career in the theater. That is to 
say, we have for the most part produced only 
plays for which we had respect. Only occa- 
sionally have we been driven for want of ma- 
terial to produce plays that were worthless as 
dramatic literature. And let me tell you this : 
our finest plays have always, with one exception, 
been the ones that made the most money. Pur- 
suing a fairly idealistic course, — not so ideal- 
istic as it should have been, — we have had in 
our joint productions only one season of pecun- 
iary loss in twenty years. There have been 
seasons of large profit, seasons of fair profit, and 
seasons of scarcely any profit at all, but only 
one season of loss. Remember that. 

"I do not mean that a young producer can, 
with a mere wave of his ideals, establish im- 
mediately a successful national institution. 

117 



MRS. FISKE 

He must have credit and he must have time. 
But our national theater need not be costly. 
The best actors? Well, the right ones, at all 
events ; but I doubt if they would often, if ever, 
be the most expensive. Then, too, any actor 
worth his salt would give his eye-teeth for a 
place in such a company. For the training, for 
the prestige, for the fun of the thing, he would 
come for almost nothing. I am afraid few 
managers would tell you so; but, appealed to 
in the right way, the players are idealistic and 
responsive. Of course there are some hopeless 
fellows; but, then, for that matter, there are 
some women who would go on wearing aigrets 
if they saw the live birds torn to pieces before 
their very eyes. And there are still men who 
will go hunting. 

"Not that an endowment could not be used," 
Mrs. Fiske was gradually willing to admit. 
"There would come in time a superb home thea- 
ter, a roomy, dignified playhouse, a theater. In 
the company's long absence on tour this would 
be hospitable to all the best dramatic endeavor 
in New York. There could be a school to train 
pupils from all over America. There would be 
a workshop to which the director could summon 

118 



A THEATER IN SPAIN 

the master electrician and the master decorator 
of the world. Then at its best the endowment 
would serve to reduce the price of seats within 
the reach of every one. It would be the hap- 
piest way, I think, if that part of it was attended 
to by the rich men of every city visited. Think 
of it, a great play perfectly presented in Denver, 
with the seats ranging at some performances 
from fifty cents, not up, but down, and with 
special trains bringing the people in from all the 
country round. It would be a joy to have a 
hand in such a project; it would be a privilege 
and an honor to appear in such a company. It 
would be no end of fun to play before such 
audiences. I 'm beginning to think," she con- 
fessed gaily, "that we shall be able to use those 
five millions, after all.' 5 

"But what would be the permanent thing in 
all this? What would give the project a con- 
tinuity of policy, the character of an institu- 
tion? If our national theater would never stay 
in one place more than a month at a time, would 
the personnel of the company remain fixed?" 

"Certainly not," said Mrs. Fiske, briskly and 
cheerfully dismissing several members on the 
spot. "Some might continue in it from one 

119 



MRS. FISKE 

year to the next, some, perhaps, for several sea- 
sons. But the perfect company for this year's 
plays would, in all probability, not be the per- 
fect company for next year's plays, and it is 
the perfect company we must have every time, 
above all other considerations." 

"Then," I asked, "what does remain fixed?" 
"The director," said Mrs. Fiske. "Yes, he 
is the constant in the problem. He will be the 
common factor in each season's work. He 
would pick the plays and stage them and follow 
them on their journey. I suppose he would 
have to return in the early spring to set moving 
the preparations for the season ahead, but his 
lieutenant, his alter ego, would remain with the 
company, his successor, perhaps. He would be 
the watcher, for there must always be a watcher. 
Let me tell you, it is not always the company 
that has been deliberately cheapened, but the 
company that has become mechanical and 'the- 
atricalized,' that offends and defrauds the cities 
along the road. The three-hundredth perform- 
ance our national theater gives in Salt Lake City 
must be as smooth, as finely keyed, as careful 
as the first performance in New York. It 
ought to be better. Indeed, it would be if the 

120 




Minnie Maddern Fiske 



A THEATER IN SPAIN 

watcher was true. Really, 55 she said with great 
conviction, "you would better move out to Salt 
Lake City. 55 

So if those eager to put their wealth at the 
service of the American theater were to come 
to Mrs. Fiske for advice, it would be this: 
"First catch your director. First catch your 
ideal director, endow him, then leave him 
alone. 55 

Of course we set forth immediately to find 
this ideal director for them. 

"I do not know who or where he is, 55 Mrs. 
Fiske admitted, "but I know what he will be 
like: he will be an amiable and gifted tyrant. 55 

"Wilde's 'cultured despot of the theater 5 ? 5 ' I 
suggested. 

"Exactly. He may or may not be a college 
man, but it would probably be an advantage 
for him to know the theater in other lands, to 
know what the Russians and Germans are doing 
without feeling that it is the beginning and end 
of his task to copy them. He may be a culti- 
vated man, but he must be of the theater. If 
a man can build a bridge, we can bear up when 
he afterward says, T done it.' And our director 
must have that mysterious sixth sense, the sense 

123 



MRS. FISKE 

of the theater, without which all is chaos, with- 
out which we often see the schemes of our 
dearest and best-intentioned putterers go comic- 
ally to pieces. 

"It is this sense that David Belasco possesses 
to an extraordinary degree. Whatever the 
extent of his vision and idealism, his under- 
standing of the theater as an instrument, his 
craftsmanship, is uncanny. At one time many 
were disinclined to take Mr. Belasco seriously; 
and then in his later years he has so often con- 
founded us with beautiful things done so beau- 
tifully that in common decency a good many 
supercilious words had to be eaten. Yet again 
and again he has devoted his rich resources to 
doing the lesser thing perfectly. Why he has 
done this, well, that is the great Belasco mys- 
tery. The exalted literatures of the theater he 
has avoided. I vow I do not know why. It 
has been through no craving for money; I am 
sure of that. To an extraordinary degree, by 
the way, almost to an hypnotic degree, as with 
all real directors, Mr. Belasco is equipped with 
a talent our ideal director must possess — the 
ability to teach the young to act. Even if there 
is no confessed school attached to our national 

124 



A THEATER IN SPAIN 

theater, the director will have one in effect. 
That is the part of his task I used particularly 
to enjoy. 55 

"And you are never abashed when they dust 
off and present to you that weather-beaten old 
saying that in the theater those who can act, act, 
and those who cannot, teach acting?" 

"Certainly not, 5 ' she replied. "In the first 
place, it 5 s an imbecile saying; and, besides, I 
never said I could act. 55 

And I remembered then how brilliantly they 
all used to play in the brave days of the Man- 
hattan Company, how far more distinguished 
were the performances some of them gave then 
than any that they seemed able to give in other 
days, under other auspices. I remembered, too, 
how one onlooker at her apparently chaotic re- 
hearsals had marveled at the results when Mrs. 
Fiske would lead a player off into the corner, 
sit down with him, talk to him for a while in 
phrases that he alone heard, but with indescriba- 
bly eloquent gestures that fairly intrigued all 
eyes, and then send him back to the stage 
equipped, apparently, as he had never been be- 
fore. What was her secret? What had she 
been telling him? I wondered audibly. 

125 



MRS. FISKE 

"I have not the faintest idea. How could 
you expect me to remember? Very likely I was 
merely giving him a thorough-bass for his com- 
position. It is often the secret of a scene, the 
very key to the floundering actor's problem. 
For lack of it you often see a performance ex- 
pire before your very eyes. Recently I wit- 
nessed a play wherein, early in a scene, there 
was a touchingly acted, naturally moving re- 
union between an anxious mother and her 
wandering boy. She expressed the immediate 
tumult nicely enough, and then took it off and 
put it away like a bonnet. She played the rest 
of the scene without a trace of it. Yet had she 
kept in mind, as the thorough-bass of her per- 
formance, the fact that whatever the text and 
however preoccupying and irrelevant the busi- 
ness, the mother would really be saying in her 
heart, 'My boy has come home, my boy has 
come home, 5 why, it would have colored her 
every word and warmed her every glance. The 
quiet, inner jubilance would have given all her 
performance a tremulous overtone, the subsid- 
ing groundswell of the emotional climax. I 
suppose that Paderewski can play superbly, if 
not quite at his best, while his thoughts wander 

126 



A THEATER IN SPAIN 

to the other end of the world, or possibly busy 
themselves with a computation of the receipts 
as he gazes out across the auditorium. I know 
a great actor, a master technician, can let his 
thoughts play truant from the scene; but we are 
not speaking of masters. We are speaking of 
actors in the making. Let me give you an in- 
stance. One of the several actors who have 
rehearsed Barnaby Dreary in 'Erstwhile Susan' 
betrayed in rehearsal a persistent, innate sunni- 
ness which promised well for the humor of the 
part, but which ill became the ugliness of that 
hard-shelled skinflint. It was in the scene 
where he was developing his precious scheme for 
marrying Juliet. I told him to remember al- 
ways that he was marrying her for her money, 
that with old Barnaby it was a matter of greed, 
greed, greed from first to last. I told him to 
keep that abstract quality — greed — constantly 
in mind, and trust to it to color all his playing. 
He tried it, and the missing note was sounded 
perfectly. His thorough-bass was there. It 
worked. It always does. 

"It is really, you see, a question of the di- 
rector's searching out the mental state, the 
spiritual fact, of a scene. Once that is found, 

127 



MRS. FISKE 

the scene will almost take care of itself. This 
is really the director's first task, the study of the 
play in its spiritual significance. It is this in- 
terpretation he must supply to his company, and 
there is no earthly reason why he himself should 
have to be an actor to be able to do it. Let 
him go away into the mountains, then, with the 
manuscript in his valise, and let him stay there 
until he understands its people as if he had 
known them all the days of their lives, until 
their salient characteristics and their relation 
one to another are fixed in his mind like the ex- 
pressions of a dear friend's face, until all the 
meaning of the play is crystal clear to him. It 
is this meaning that he establishes at the first 
reading to the actors, the all-important first 
reading when he assembles the company before 
him for the first time. For the director inter- 
prets the play. 

"Of course only a play of some depth will 
reward such study; but, then, that is the only 
kind of play our ideal director will concern him- 
self with. Once he has mastered the play's 
meanings, he can breeze into the rehearsals 
confident that the action will suggest itself. 
Indeed, I am so sure of this that my own prompt- 

128 



A THEATER IN SPAIN 

books are just illegible masses of — well, of 
mental notes, without, I am afraid, a single 
suggestion of practical business that might serve 
a stranger taking them up. You might find the 
word 'pensive' in the margin without any sug- 
gestion that the girl must cross to left center and 
gaze sadly at the coals in the fireplace." I 
could not resist stealing a glance then at the 
prompt-book on which she was working, and 
found the margins littered with such phrases as 
these concerning the various speeches : "Soften 
all, make gracious," or, "Sudden, passionate 
outthrust," or, "Brilliant contempt, inde- 
pendence f ardor, bravery," or, "Free, brave, in- 
dividual," and I amused myself with the picture 
of the average New York director trying to 
make use of such suggestions. "As a matter of 
fact," Mrs. Fiske confessed, "I have always re- 
lied so largely on the help and advice of Mr. 
Fiske that I cannot work alone. I am colos- 
sally ignorant about the mechanics of produc- 
tion. Once I was left alone during a tour of 
the South to rehearse the company in 'The 
Pillars of Society/ The tangle which I finally 
achieved in the matter of 'business/ positions, 
exits, and entrances, and the like was quite too 

129 



MRS. FISKE 

wonderful. I used to survey it from the orches- 
tra-stalls, marveling at the ingenuity of the 
snarl, and wondering how Mr. Fiske could pos- 
sibly unravel it in the few days given to him in 
New York. Of course he did succeed in re- 
lieving the congestion and setting all straight, 
but I remember that after the first rehearsal he 
was in a cold perspiration. Your ideal director 
should know his theater as Kreisler knows his 
violin, but much of the instrument I am abso- 
lutely ignorant of. I suppose fragments of the 
heathenish lingo have lingered in my mind. 
Perhaps, at a pinch, I could rush down the 
aisle at a rehearsal and command, 'A little 
more of the baby on the king!' I dare say 
the electrician would know what I meant, but 
I should n't." 

Whereat Mr. Fiske chuckled reminiscently. 
He had just stepped out from the house with a 
handful of freshly written letters. He paused 
on the little veranda long enough to add an 
anecdote to the table-talk. 

"I am reminded," he said, "of the only time 
Mrs. Fiske ever lost her temper in the theater. 
It was the night of the first performance of 
'Salvation NelP in New York, and we had 

130 



< 

P 

o" 

3 



o 




A THEATER IN SPAIN 

come to the last act, set, if you remember, in 
the slums at a Cherry Hill street-crossing. 
There was a scene in which Mrs. Fiske and Mr. 
Blinn were to sit on a door-step in the deserted 
street, and she had asked that the only light 
should be a dismal ray, as from some flickering 
gas-jet beyond the half-open door of the tene- 
ment-house behind them/ 5 

Mrs. Fiske paused in the consumption of a 
wafer just long enough to interpolate: 

"A very proper light for two middle-aged 
actors," and then went on with her confection. 

"But the excitement of the first night had 
gone to the poor electrician's head," said Mr. 
Fiske. "In one mad moment he forgot every- 
thing that had been told him, and squarely on 
that East-Side romance he shot the whitest, 
brightest, most dazzling spot-light in the entire 
equipment of the theater. After the final cur- 
tain had fallen — that came a few moments 
later, fortunately — I went back to applaud 
everybody, and found Mrs. Fiske still inarticu- 
late with rage. And she had been helpless, be- 
cause she had not been able to order the cor- 
rection she wanted. She could not even tell 
precisely what had happened. All she really 

133 



MRS. FISKE 

knew about a light was whether it was too 
bright or too dim." 

Mrs. Fiske could keep silent no longer. 

"But is n't that the entire point about a 
light? 5 

And quite vanquished, Mr. Fiske retreated 
laughingly down the road toward the post-office 
with his letters in his hand. We returned to 
the manuscript. She had been speaking of 
manuscripts as completed things, whereas, of 
course, a new play must often be rewritten from 
beginning to end after it reaches the director's 
hands. I spoke of one distinguished producer 
who has a way of toiling so faithfully over a 
new piece that by the time the opening night 
arrives his name is quite likely to appear on 
the program as co-author. I recalled Arthur 
Hopkins as saying once that any director worth 
his salt must be fit and willing to take off his 
coat, roll up his sleeves, and go to work on a 
manuscript with the promising playwrights of 
his day and country. I remembered, too, that 
Mrs. Fiske, for all her stubborn anonymity, had 
gradually accumulated among the wiseacres a 
reputation for writing half of every play in 
which she appears. I hoped to find out about 

134 



A THEATER IN SPAIN 

this, but only her eyes — concerning the color of 
which, by the way, no two chroniclers agree — 
made answer. 

"Langdon Mitchell — " I ventured, giving 
voice tentatively to an old and wide-spread sus- 
picion — a poor thing, but not my own — that 
Mrs. Fiske had done much to the manuscripts 
of the only two considerable successes he had 
had in the theater, "Becky Sharp" and "The 
New York Idea." 

"Langdon Mitchell writes every word of his 
plays," she protested. "I do not recall that I 
ever suggested a line to him. Of course nearly 
every play that is finally established in the thea- 
ter is the work of several minds. It must be 
so. I imagine it always has been so. Of the 
standard plays that have come down to us — 
Shakspere's, Sheridan's, Wilde's — we are apt 
to forget that what we have of them is not the 
manuscript the playwright first brought to the 
theater, but the thing as it grew in conference, 
altered in rehearsal, developed in performance, 
and finally took form in the prompt-book. 
Who knows what 'Macbeth' was like when the 
first rehearsal of it was called? 

"Of course the printed classics are ready for 

135 



MRS. FISKE 

the stage. An Ibsen play needs no tinkering. 
It is not only an expression of genius and a 
drama technically flawless, but a tried and 
tested play, already purified by the fire of re- 
hearsal and performance. And yet there 's 
really no stopping us." Here her voice sank to 
a stealthy whisper, as though she suspected 
every little bit of shrubbery of concealing an 
alert little dramatic critic. "Let me tell you 
that once I even did a bit of rewriting on Ibsen. 
* In producing 'Hedda Gabler' I transposed two 
of the speeches! And what is more, no one 
ever caught me. 

"But with the pseudo-Ibsens and the baby 
Ibsens the director must sometimes labor — labor 
systematically as he does with the actor in the 
making. They are not always grateful; but 
what does that matter? I 've never uttered all 
the burning thoughts I have accumulated on the 
vanity of one or two authors I have met, and 
I never will. Once, it is true, I did speak 
sharply to one of them. He sat contentedly 
through a performance of his play and then, at 
the end of the third act, came stormily back 
upon the stage. He was in a towering rage. 
The wonderful final speech, he complained, had 

136 



A THEATER IN SPAIN 

been slaughtered, fairly slaughtered by the ac- 
tor speaking it. 'Well, my dear sir/ I said, 
'bear up. You did not write it/ " 

"Ah, ha!" I observed, with the accents of a 
detective. 

"But that happened only once," she ex- 
plained hurriedly. "Really, it is false, this 
idea that I have collaborated extensively with 
the authors who have written for us. I cannot 
write plays. If I could, I should write them. 55 

I must have looked utterly unconvinced, but 
she changed the subject. 

"After all, why concern ourselves with the 
authors 5 vanity when in the theater the vanity 
that poisons and kills is the vanity of the actor, 
the egregious vanity of the c my-part 5 actor. 
The director's first business is to guard the in- 
terest, to preserve the integrity, of the play. 
The actor who does not work in this same spirit 
should be banished. He never should have en- 
tered the theater at all. His attitude is -wrong. 
From the beginning he must have approached it 
in quite the wrong spirit — the spirit that takes, 
not the spirit that gives. He should be shown 
the stage-door for good and all without more 
ado. There are really no terms in which one 

137 



MRS. FISKE 

can discuss this bane of the theater. It simply 
should not be. Night and day, from the first 
rehearsal to the hundredth performance, the 
director should dedicate himself to the utter 
obliteration of the 'my-part' actor. 

"The c my-part' actor is the low creature who 
thinks of every scene in every play in terms of 
his own role. He sacrifices everything to his 
own precious opportunities. What makes it so 
hard to suppress him is the fact that he is for- 
ever being encouraged. Instead of being shot 
and fatally wounded by some discerning, but 
irritable, playgoer, as likely as not he will be 
rapturously applauded for his sins. The papers 
next day may report that his was the only per- 
formance that 'stood out' Stood out, indeed, 
as if that were necessarily a compliment ! I re- 
member that the most conspicuous and warmly 
applauded performance in 'Sumurun' was an 
outrageously protruding figure that robbed of 
its proper values the more shy and reticent beau- 
ties of the other playing. It 'stood out 5 like a 
gaudy lithograph included by mistake in a port- 
folio of etchings. 

"It is so easy for the unthinking to mistake 
for distinction the c my-part' actor's protruding 

138 



A THEATER IN SPAIN 

from the ensemble. Not at the first glance do 
we appreciate the lovely reticence of Venice." 

"Well/' I offered by way of mock consola- 
tion, cc Wilde was disappointed in the Atlantic 
Ocean." 

"What a dreadful analog! No, we need 
not be supercilious. We may be merely un- 
impressed by its pastel neutrality. I do not 
know what we expect; the brave colors of the 
Grand Canon, possibly. So it is that we do 
not always appreciate at first the modest beauty 
of pastel playing. The lesser actor who tries 
hard to protrude from the ensemble is guilty of 
a misdemeanor; but, then, his sin is as nothing 
compared with the felonious self-assertion of 
the so-called star who not only basks in the 
center of the stage at any and all times, but 
sees to it that no one else in the company shall 
amount to anything. Thus are plays first 
twisted out of shape and then cast on the rub- 
bish-heap. I remember once attending recep- 
tively the performance of one of our most pop- 
ular actresses in one of her most popular plays. 
I was simply appalled by the quality of the 
company, compared with which she 'stood out' 
with a vengeance. Finally I saw a passage of 

139 



MRS. FISKE 

exquisite light comedy intrusted to an actor 
that the manager of a fifth-rate stock-company 
would have blushed to have in his employ. At 
the end of the scene I rose from my seat, made 
for the open air, and never returned. 

'The great people of the theater have in- 
dulged in no such degradations. Duse's lead- 
ing man, Ando, was as good as she was or 
nearly as good. At least he was the best she 
could find in all Italy. The companies that 
came to us with Irving and Terry were artists 
all." 

And whatever they might say of her, I 
thought, they could never say she was a "my- 
part" actor who had gathered about her such 
players as Mr. Mack, Mr. Arliss, Mr. Cart- 
wright, and Mr. Mason, to mention only a few 
of those who shone in the constellation of the 
old Manhattan Company. 

"Certainly," I said, "when you gave 'The 
Pillars of Society,' the best opportunity was 
Holbrook Blinn's." 

"And when we gave 'Leah Kleschna,' my 
role was the fifth in importance. Do you 
know, the only dramatic criticism that ever en- 
raged me was an account of 'Mary of Magdala' 

140 



■:U" ' . 




Becky Sharp 



A THEATER IN SPAIN 

that spoke zestfully of Mr. Tyrone Power as 
'carrying away the honors of the play/ quite 
as though it had not been known all along that 
Mr. Power would carry away the honors of the 
play, quite as if we had not realized perfectly 
that the role of Judas was the role of roles, 
quite as though that was not the very reason 
why Mr. Power was invited to play it. It was 
too obtuse, too exasperating, yet a common 
enough point of view in the theater, Heaven 
knows. It is the point of view of the actor 
who tries to thrust his own role forward, and he 
should be hissed from the stage. The success- 
ful actress who seeks to have in her company 
any but the very best players to be had should 
be calmly and firmly wiped out. From morn- 
ing till night, from June to September, the di- 
rector must war against the actor's vanity." 

Yet how many have treated these familiar 
phenomena as an essential part of the actor's 
nature! "If he were n't vain, he would n't be 
an actor at all." That is the time-honored way 
of putting it. "Struts and frets his hour" — 
why, it has always been accepted as part of the 
theater. Something to this effect I countered 
vaguely as I walked toward the run-about 

H3 



MRS. FISKE 

which had called for me from the livery in the 
village below. 

"I have no patience whatever with that an- 
cient theory/ 5 said Mrs. Fiske. "Actors have 
been coddled with it entirely too long. They 
used to say," she added with a mischievous 
smile — "they used to say that a real newspaper 
man would always be half drunk." 

"Nous avons change tout gela" I replied 
with an accent that cannot be described. The 
French of Stratford 'at-a-boy, perhaps. 

"And we must change all this," said Mrs. 
Fiske, cheerfully. "What shall we do with the 
f my-part' actor in our national theater? What 

was the procedure Mr. F 's aunt used to 

recommend? Oh, yes. Throw 5 im out of the 
winder. 5 " 



144 



GOING TO THE PLAY 

MRS. FISKE allowed me to escort her to 
the play. It was one afternoon in New 
York when she herself was not playing, and 
she was fired with a desire to watch with her 
own eyes a fairly celebrated actor who was fill- 
ing one of our theaters at the time. If he were 
all they said of him, she had a tremendous pro- 
gram of plays planned, all unbeknown to him, 
for his immediate future. So we talked of him 
as we settled back in the shadow of an upper 
box to wait for that expectant hush when, as 
Mr. Leacock says, the orchestra "boils over in 
a cadence and stops," when the house grows 
suddenly dark, the footlights spring to life, and 
at last the curtains part. Which was naive of 
us, for this was in New York, and there is no 
hush; only the clatter of unblushing late ar- 
rivals mingling pleasantly with the chatter of 
an audience which had brought its manners 
from the movies. 

H5 



MRS. FISKE 

Mrs. Fiske was comfortable in what she 
fondly believed was the incognito afforded by 
a sheltering hat and an impenetrable veil; but 
had you been peering down from the last row 
in the gallery, I do not see how you could have 
failed to recognize her. One glimpse of those 
alert and extraordinarily characteristic shoul- 
ders, the sight, perhaps, of a familiar hand up- 
lifted eloquently to score a point, and you 
would have known as well as I that Becky 
Sharp had come to see the play. But she was 
unaware of your scrutiny from the gallery; in 
fact, I doubt if there was any gallery. Her 
all-consuming interest at the moment was the 
star of the afternoon. 

"Does he know his business?" she wanted to 
know. "He does? Has he vitality? Some- 
times I wonder which is the more important. 
So many of these younger actors seem half 
asleep. Has he dignity? Most important of 
all, has he distinction? What a priceless asset 
for the actor or actress, distinction of manner 
and personality ! Three of the most gifted of 
our younger actresses are without it. It is too 
bad. It is heart-breaking. Each possesses 
strong dramatic instinct, great intelligence, 

146 



GOING TO THE PLAY 

charm, humor, emotional understanding; but 
each is utterly without the 'grand manner/ 
No matter how earnestly they aspire and work, 
they can never become commanding figures in 
the theater. That is," she added doubtfully, 
"unless distinction can be acquired. I wonder 
if it can be. Once a very clever, experienced, 
and splendidly trained young actress played a 
certain ingenue part with us. She had acting 
to her finger-tips, but she lacked the wonderful 
something her rather amateur successor pos- 
sessed in a high degree. When the successor 
took the place, it was as if a rose had suddenly 
blossomed into the play. Distinction — that 
was it. Has our friend of this afternoon dis- 
tinction?" 

I refuse to commit myself. I rather thought 
he did have dignity, considerable of it. 

"He is terribly in earnest," I confided, "and 
I have a sneaking suspicion it grieves him inex- 
pressibly that his art is only for the hour, and 
cannot live to tell the tale when he is gone." 

Her eyes began to twinkle mutinously. 

"You cannot mean it," she protested. "Do 
actors really fret about that any more? Did 
they ever? I suppose they did. At least they 

147 



MRS. FISKE 

said a good deal about it. I remember a 
delightfully melancholy bit on the subject in 
Cibber." 

And out of her inexhaustible memory she 
gave me in tones of mock solemnity these stately 
words, set down long ago by that famous actor, 
critic, dramatist, and annalist of the stage, 
Colley Cibber: 

Pity it is that the momentary beauties flowing from 
an harmonious elocution cannot, like those of poetry, 
be their own record! That the animated graces of 
the player can live no longer than the instant breadth 
and motion that presents them; or, at best, can but 
imperfectly glimmer through the memory or imper- 
fect attestation of a few surviving spectators ! 

"But you do not have to go as far back as 
Cibber," I put in. "I am sure Mr. Jefferson 
was feeling a little afflicted when he said there 
was nothing so useless as a dead actor, and I 
know Lawrence Barrett used to lament lugu- 
briously that it was his fate every night of his 
life to carve a statue in snow." 

Whereat Mrs. Fiske indulged herself in the 
most irreverent smile I have ever seen. 

"Did Mr. Barrett really say that? Dear! 
dear! how seriously we take ourselves! And 

148 



GOING TO THE PLAY 

how absurd when we are paid in our own life- 
time so much more in money and applause and 
fame than we often deserve, than any mortal 
could deserve! But, above all, how unthink- 
able that any one who looks at all beyond the 
hour of his death could be concerned with any- 
thing less personal and momentous than the 
fate of his own soul, could be anything but 
utterly engrossed by the intense wonder and 
curiosity as to what his life hereafter would be ! 
There is something interesting. The great 
adventure ! 

"Yet, mind you," she went on, "I am not so 
sure there is no immortality for the actor. Of 
course the prodigious Mrs. Siddons — she must 
have been prodigious — lives in the enthusiasm, 
the recorded enthusiasm, of the men and women 
who saw her at Drury Lane. But who shall 
say her work does not survive in still another 
way? The best dramatic school I know is just 
the privilege of watching the great perform- 
ances, and I like to think that the players 
Sarah Siddons inspired have handed on the 
inspiration from generation to generation. 
Thus would genius be eternally rekindled, and 
every once in a great while, quite without warn- 

149 



MRS. FISKE 

ing, we seem to be witnessing the renewal of 
the theater. I know I felt something of that 
when I saw the glow of Gareth Hughes's per- 
formance in 'Moloch/ But as for carving a 
statue in snow — "' 

And here Mrs. Fiske laughed so gaily that 
it was impossible to be serious any more. 
Indeed, when she can be persuaded to talk 
about the theater at all, it is usually with incor- 
rigible lightness. And as she brought her 
inquisitive lorgnette to bear upon the program, 
I felt a sudden understanding and compassion 
for any one who had ever tried to interview her. 
I knew they had tried again and again, and if 
the results have been meager, I realized it was 
not because they were rebuffed, but because 
they were baffled. I was sure none of the tried 
and trusted baits would serve. I doubted if 
she would rise even to that old stand-by, 
"Mummer Worship," the contemptuous essay 
in which George Moore speaks of acting as 
"the lowest of the arts, if it is an art at all," 
and one which "makes slender demands on the 
intelligence of the individual exercising it," the 
scornful paper in which he describes the modern 
mummer as one whose vanity has grown as 

150 




'Erstwhile Susan" 



GOING TO THE PLAY 

weed never grew before till it "overtops all 
things human." Let the interviewer ask 
almost any actor what he thinks of "Mummer 
Worship," and he will get five columns of 
material without the need of another question. 
I wondered. I investigated. What did Mrs. 
Fiske think of "Mummer Worship"? 

She gazed at me with mild surprise. 

"What do I think of it?" she asked. "Dear 
child, I wrote it." 

I might have known. 

"Of course," she added, "there is no end of 
offensive nonsense in it, and somehow Mr. 
Moore leaves a bad taste in the mouth when all 
is said and done. Many of us find it more or 
less difficult to keep out of the mire and pre- 
tentious, detailed exhibitions of inability to 
keep out of it are, to say the least unpleasant; 
but in the matter of acting's place among the 
arts, I am not sure that even our dear Mr. Lewes 
realized why he had been led to think so often 
that the actor was the less exalted and 1# *ss 
creative artist. I suspect it was because he 
had seen most of them in Shakspere, an im- 
measurably greater artist than any actor we 
know of. None could be compared with him; 

153 



MRS. FISKE 

yet, in the estimate of the actor's place in the 
arts, they all have been compared with Shak- 
spere, I think. But there are times when the 
actor as an artist is far greater and more crea- 
tive than his material, when he does something 
more than 'repeat a portion of a story invented 
by another, 5 as Mr. Moore has it. Yet quite 
as distinguished a writer has said the least 
gifted author of a play, the least gifted creator 
of a drama, is a man of higher intellectual 
importance than his best interpreter. Now, 
distinguished though he be, this writer betrays 
himself as one untrained in the psychology of 
the theater. We actors are time and again 
compelled to read values into plays — values 
unprovided by our authors. Think of Duse in 
'Magda.' Out of her knowledge of life, out of 
her vision, by virtue of her incomparable art, 
she created depths in th&t character which 
Sudermann not only never put there, but never 
could have put there." 

"I remember," I said, "that somewhere 
Arthur Symons sighed over Duse, and wept that 
the poets of the day left empty that perfect 
'chalice for the wine of imagination/ " 

"Fie upon the poets!" Mrs. Fiske agreed; 

154 



GOING TO THE PLAY 

"and yet it always seemed to me that the rich 
wine of her own imagination kept that chalice 
full almost to the brim. But mind you," she 
whispered while we drew our chairs forward as 
the lights went down for the play, "as for the 
first part of 'Mummer Worship/ it was a little 
thing of my own." 

When a blaze of anger from one of the 
women in the play brought down the curtain at 
the end of the first act, Mrs. Fiske devoted her- 
self to a few moments of approving applause. 

"Admirable!" she exclaimed. "That, my 
friend, was the essence of acting." 

And I pounced on the phrase, for here was 
a little problem in dramatic criticism that 
interested me enormously, because it seemed to 
hold the key to half the wild confusion of 
thought in contemporary comment on the art 
of acting. "The essence of acting!" I fished 
from my pocket a frowzy envelop on which 
some time before I had scribbled sentences from 
two essays of the day. One of them had said, 
"A good actor is one who is successful in com- 
pletely immersing his own personality in the 
role he is playing." And the other had said, 

155 



MRS. FISKE 

"The very essence of acting lies in the capacity 
of assumption and impersonation of a con- 
ceived character and personality different from 
that of the player." 

I showed them to Mrs. Fiske not merely 
because, to me, they seemed wild, but because 
they seemed typically wild, not merely because 
these men had said them, but because many had 
implied them and reared thereon shaky struc- 
tures of dramatic criticism. She read them 
with the smile with which one greets an old 
friend. 

"Speaking as a dramatic critic," Mrs. Fiske 
began in a profoundly judicial manner. Then 
she paused, and smiled a little as though some 
mischievous thought were trying to dispel her 
judicial calm. 

"But what," I persisted, "is the answer?" 

"Answer? There are seven answers which 
occur to me offhand." . 

"Tell me one." 

"Duse," she replied triumphantly. "And 
the other six are Irving, Terry, Mansfield, Jef- 
ferson, Rejane, and Sarah Bernhardt. I am 
sure if we went back over all the reams and 
reams that were written about this splendid 

156 



GOING TO THE PLAY 

seven, we should find a good deal about their 
'just playing themselves/ Yet when the 
writers on the stage brandish that phrase, when 
they talk of 'immersing the personality,' I 
suspect they are engrossed for the moment with 
personal appearance, mannerisms, matters of 
mimicry, and disguise. They are engrossed 
with externals. Yet can they possibly think 
these factors, incalculably important though 
they be, are involved in the essence of acting? 
So much of the confusion of thought can be 
traced, I think, to the very use of the words 
'mannerisms' and 'personality' when they mean 
a larger thing. They mean style. What they 
see recurrent in each impersonation of a great 
artist is just this style. It is a part of the art 
of all artists, but only the actor is scolded for 
it. Wagner is intensely Wagnerian even in 
the most humorous passages of 'Die Meister- 
singer.' Whistler is always Whistler, and 
Sargent always Sargent. Dickens was always 
Dickens. The one time he lapsed from his 
own style was when he wrote 'The Tale of Two 
Cities,' and only those who do not love Dickens 
at all like that book the best. Only Charles 
Reade was at his best when he was not himself. 

157 



MRS. FISKE 

Chesterton is always extravagantly himself, 
even when he writes for the theater. Imagine 
a Barrie book that was not Barriesque, or a 
Barrie play that was not at all Barrie. In that 
sense Duse was always Duse and Irving was 
always Irving. 55 

"Suppose, 55 I ventured, "that an actor in 
your company were called upon to play an old 
Scotch gardener in a towering rage. What 
would be the essential thing? 55 

"The rage, 55 she answered instantly, and then 
added in a moment of caution, "though if he 
did not suggest gardening and age and Scot- 
land, the director should plot his undoing. He 
should want him out of the company. But 
the rage would be the heart of the matter, the 
real test of him, the essence of his acting. 55 

"Then the essential thing is the emotion — 55 

"I am afraid of the word. It has been 
depreciated by 'emotionalism, 5 whatever that 
may mean. If it does not mean acting, it does 
not mean anything. No, 55 she went on reflec- 
tively, "I have never tried before to put it into 
words, but it seems to me that the essence of 
acting is the conveyance of certain states of 
mind and heart, certain spiritual things, certain 

i 5 8 



GOING TO THE PLAY 

abstract qualities. It is the conveyance of 
truth by the actor as a medium. What is 
truth?" And she held up her hand as if to 
draw it in through the tips of her fingers. "It 
is everywhere, in the skies, in the mountains, in 
the air around us, in life. The essence of act- 
ing is the conveyance of truth through the 
medium of the actor's mind and person. The 
science of acting deals with the perfecting of 
that medium. The great actors are the lumi- 
nous ones. They are the great conductors of 
the stage." 

She laughed a little. 

"Are we getting too mystical?" she asked. 

"Somewhat." 

"It will do us good. But be sure of this, 
the essence of acting is the expression of the 
abstract thing, courage, fear, despair, anguish, 
anger, pity, piety. The great roles are, in that 
sense, abstractions. So Juliet is youthful love, 
and Lady Macbeth is will power or ruthless 
ambition, as you will. Think of Duse in c La 
Locandiera.' As for her mannerisms, as to the 
extent of her disguise, as for the difference 
between her role and her own personality, I 
do not remember. In many matters of exter- 

159 



/ 



MRS. FISKE 

nals she was careless. You know she was 
almost theatrical in her untheatricalism. Her 
make-up for Mirandolina and Santuzza was 
virtually the same. Mirandolina in that de- 
lightful comedy is the coquettish hostess of the 
inn. I do not remember how exactly she 
represented or suggested a hostess of an inn. 
What I do remember is that she was more than 
a coquettish hostess. She was more than a 
coquette. She achieved a sublimation. She 
was coquetry. I think of her in the book scene 
from Taolo and Francesca.' There she played 
the guilty lover, but she was more than a guilty 
lover; she was guilty love. And so," said Mrs. 
Fiske, "I think there must be something amiss 
with those definitions on the back of your 
envelop, for when we look on the great actors 
of our time, the questions those definitions raise 
may vanish utterly — vanish into thin air. 
Indeed, the greatest actors have, in a sense, 
always played themselves. When I remember 
Duse, I cannot think of her degree of success 
in this or that impersonation. I cannot think 
of her variations. I think only of the essential 
thing, the style, the quality, that was Duse. 
Just as we think of a certain style and quality 

160 




"When I remember Duse ... I think only of the essen- 
tial thing, the style, the quality, that was Duse" 



GOING TO THE PLAY 

at the very mention of Whistler's name. 
When I remember Irving and Terry, I am 
inclined to think that Miss Terry was the 
greater actor, the more luminous medium, just 
because, while I can think of Irving in widely 
varied characterizations, I can think of her only 
as the quality that was Ellen Terry, the inde- 
scribable iridescence of her, the brilliance that 
was like sunlight shimmering on the waters of 
a fountain. When I think of Ellen Terry in 
her prime, were it Portia or Olivia or Beatrice, 
I think of light, light, radiance, radiance, 
always moving, moving, moving, always mo- 
tion." 

I wish that Ellen Terry, and all the rest of 
the world, for that matter, could have seen and 
heard Mrs. Fiske as she spoke these words for 
remembrance. 

"But," she added, smiling, "it isn't Ellen 
Terry this afternoon, and here is our second 
act." 

When the curtain fell again, and the house 
began to buzz even more vigorously than while 
the scene was in progress, we caught at the loose 
ends of our first entr'acte. 

163 



MRS. FISKE 

"We made our little definition on the spur 
of the moment," said Mrs. Fiske, "but I think I 
could prove it by the great actors I have 
seen." 

"Who was the greatest actor you ever saw?" 
I demanded, who have a passion for such things. 
"What was the greatest single performance?" 

Mrs. Fiske gazed distractedly about her. 

"I could not possibly tell." 

"Of course not. We never can. What 
was the greatest short story? Shall we say C A 
Lodging for the Night' to save the trouble of 
thinking it out? Ask any novelist to name the 
greatest novel, and he will say 'Torn Jones/ " 

"But," said the heretic, "it might embarrass 
him dreadfully, poor man, if you were to ask 
him to name any of the characters in 'Tom 
Jones.' " 

"Of course it's an impossible question, I 
know; but I should like to know what names 
come to your mind when you try to answer it. 
Suppose," I persisted — "suppose you were 
asked at the point of a loaded gun to name the 
greatest performance you ever saw, what would 
you say?" 

Mrs. Fiske had an answer for that : 
164 



GOING TO THE PLAY 

"Shoot!" So I threw away the gun and 
surrendered. 

"But, you see/' she explained, "I have had 
such mere snatches as a playgoer. I have been 
very little to the theater. Often the great 
actors have played here in the city when I was 
here, and yet, evening for evening and matinee 
for matinee, I, too was playing and could not 
see them. We of the stage who are critical, 
but responsive, playgoers, and who go more 
than half-way to meet every play, have few 
opportunities at your side of the footlights. 
So I saw Edwin Booth only when he was too 
old and Mansfield only when he was too young. 
I never saw him in his mature years. If I were 
to speak slightingly of him, you might wring 
from me the admission that I had seen him in 
none of his great roles. Then I know, if you 
do not, how players vary in a single role, how 
unfair a chance glimpse of them on an off night 
may be. The worst performances I ever gave 
as Becky Sharp were both in New York. One 
was at the premiere of the play; the other was 
on the first night of its revival. I should not 
care to be judged on those. It would be ab- 
surd. They were shocking performances, both 

165 



MRS. FISKE 

of them. Indeed, the annalist of the stage 
who allows himself to write positively on the 
work of a really great stage artist at one sit- 
ting is on unsafe ground. A really great mas- 
ter in any art must be studied. We may not 
understand him at all at first. Particularly is 
the critic of great acting in danger. Great ac- 
tors are not so steady as great painters, com- 
posers, sculptors, or writers. They are not so 
dependable. I have seen Miss Terry, Duse, 
and others of high degree give shockingly bad 
performances. Personally, I am cautious as a 
critic. I am careful not to give an opinion on 
the work of an actor of great reputation until 
I have studied him carefully many times. I 
am fearful of making a blunder. No artist is 
so likely to be over-keyed as the really great ac- 
tor, and if he is over-keyed, he gives a hopeless 
performance. 

"There is one minor actress, however, of 
whom I have always been, a merciless critic. 
That is myself. I acted 'Salvation Nell* 
steadily for two years, and in all that time I 
gave only one performance that I approved, 
only one that was really good. That solitary 
performance was given, by the way, in Bridge- 

166 







"Mary of Magdala" 



GOING TO THE PLAY 

port, Connecticut. Did you happen to be 
there?" she asked, with mock concern. "I was 
afraid not. But you see why I hesitate to play 
critic out of my meager experiences as a play- 
goer. 

'Then, too, I know that some of the finest 
things lie unchronicled far off the beaten track. 
I often wonder how many of them I have not 
only missed, but never even heard of. I know 
one of the most stirring performances I ever 
witnessed was in a little German theater out 
West, and one of the most stimulating play- 
houses I know is the Neighborhood Playhouse 
far down in Grand Street. It wins one's ad- 
miration and respect at once. It is a rest and 
delight to enter its lobby. Rare good taste 
prevails everywhere, in the auditorium, in every 
department behind the scenes — good taste, good 
sense. The Neighborhood Playhouse has made 
no pretensions; its policy is dignified and prac- 
tical. The higher and more 'advanced' dra- 
matic literature is given careful, sympathetic, 
and intelligent interpretation. More than 
that, one is as apt as not to experience the thrill 
of a moment of genuine beauty here and there. 
And surprises are in store. The whole spirit of 

169 



MRS. FISKE 

the thing is so fine that one cannot help hoping 
it will grow eventually into something bigger 
and of greater service. 

"We must be careful, though, not to take the 
tone of patronizing discoverers when we tell 
of the out-of-the-way theaters. I remember an 
American professor writing home from Italy 
years ago of a performance he had stumbled on 
in an obscure and dingy theater in Venice. He 
was really quite impressed, and added grac- 
iously that some of our fairly good American 
actors might do worse than contemplate such 
sound and unpretentious endeavor. It was not 
until long afterward that he found out whom 
he had seen that afternoon," she said, with a 
delighted laugh at the recollection. "As he 
had not bought a program that day in Venice, 
it was not until she came in triumph to Amer- 
ica that he knew he had stumbled on that out- 
of-the-way actress, Eleanora Duse." 

"But the great names that come to mind?" 
I prompted at the sound of one of them. 

"Well," she said, "I have played with a good 
many. I played with Barry Sullivan, Laura 
Keene, E. H. Davenport, John McCullough, 
Junius Brutus Booth, Mary Anderson. But 

170 



GOING TO THE PLAY 

you cannot expect me to remember what I prob- 
ably did not even notice at the time. And 
having started at three, I was such a tiny child 
when I played with most of those. I could not 
have been five when I was in Miss Keene's com- 
pany. Of all those with whom I played when 
I was a mere baby, my most vivid memory is 
of J. K. Emmet, and I have never known since 
then a more overwhelming charm than that 
graceless comedian had. I played with him in 
New York in a piece called 'Karl and Hilda, 5 
a momentous occasion, for it was then that Mr. 
Fiske first beheld me, and it was then that Em- 
met sang for the first time — to me sitting there 
on his knee — his famous lullaby. He had 
charm in the sense that Lotta had it, and still 
has it. 

"So I saw a good many of the great folk in 
those days, but I doubt if I ever appreciated a 
performance as great until I saw Adelaide Neil- 
son as Viola. I was thirteen then, and to this 
day I remember the beauty and the technic of 
that performance. I remember perfectly bits 
of 'business/ Certainly Miss Neilson comes to 
my mind, and moments of the great Janau- 
schek. Then Duse as Mirandolina, as Fran- 

171 



MRS. FISKE 

cesca^ and in 'La f emme de Claude' ; Irving and 
Terry in The Vicar of Wakefield' and The 
Merchant of Venice'; Jefferson as Bob Acres 
and Rip; and Calve as Carmen and Santuzza. 
You may think of Calve only as a great singer. 
I think of her as a great actress. 

"But that was long ago. I do not know 
when in later years I have been more impressed 
than by the work of Frances Starr and Harriet 
Otis Dellenbaugh in 'Marie Odile/ and the 
work of Nazimova in 'War Brides.' Then do 
you remember the work of Miss Anglin in the 
lighter scenes of 'Helena Richie/ and her 
beautiful comedy in a one-act play called 
'After the Ball' ? There is a sort of splendor 
in Miss Anglin's personality, it seems to me. 
And certainly I must not forget the fine play- 
ing I have witnessed not from the auditorium, 
but from my own corner of the stage. Let me 
pay my respects to George Arliss in The New 
York Idea' and 'Leah Kleschna/ John Mason 
and Marian Lea in The New York Idea/ 
Tyrone Power in 'Mary of Magdala/ Hol- 
brook Blinn and Gilda Varesi in 'Salvation 
Nell/ William B. Mack in 'Kleschna' and 
'Hedda Gabler/ and Carlotta Nillson in 

172 



GOING TO THE PLAY 

'Hedda.' How many of these come to mind! 
There was Fuller Mellish and Albert Bruning 
in 'Rosmersholm,' Arthur Byron in The High 
Road/ and Florine Arnold as Ma in 'Mrs. 
Bumpstead-Leigh.' There was Frederic de 
Belleville in 'Little Italy' and 'Divorgons'; 
there was Max Figman in 'Divorgons.' I can 
never forget the exquisite performance of Percy 
Standing as the jailor in 'Lady Betty Martin- 
gale/ How can I hope to tell you all I have 
admired! As for the best of all, I suppose it 
was something of Duse's. Or Terry's, perhaps. 
But there I go again. I do not know." 

And there went the curtain again. The third 
and last act was on, and the few moments of 
reminiscence were over. 

These were fleeting, haphazard reminiscences 
of Mrs. Fiske as a playgoer. Her reminiscences 
as an actress may not be set down here, for her 
thoughts are too much of to-day and to-mor- 
row for the past to find much place even in her 
most idle conversation. We all know that the 
story of her life on the stage, an adventurous, 
multitudinous career covering nearly half a cen- 
tury of the American theater, would be en- 

173 



MRS. FISKE 

grossing reading, but it is hard for me to im- 
agine her ever becoming sufficiently interested 
in that story to set it down on paper. 

After I had lured a cab out of the jam of 
traffic in Forty-second Street that afternoon 
and helped her into it, I thought, as I walked 
away, how amazingly long and varied that 
story would be. Most of the present genera- 
tion of playgoers would expect to find little 
beyond the chapters dealing with that most sig- 
nificant and most productive period of her 
career, the years of the Manhattan Company, 
from her appearance as Tess to the presentation 
here and in Chicago of Hauptmann's wonder- 
ful "Hannele." But there would be many 
other chapters. 

The story would have to account for a very 
small actress trotting obliviously through the 
children's roles back in the early seventies in the 
cavernous playhouses along the lower reaches 
of the Mississippi. It would then have to ac- 
count for the spirited and capricious Minnie 
Maddern journeying all over America in the 
hoidenish comedies of a day gone by; for the 
new actress named Mrs. Fiske who came back 
to the stage in the nineties to play some of the 

174 



GOING TO THE PLAY 

most somber tragedies of our time, and to share 
with Mr. Fiske and the independents the 
mighty battle against the syndicate; then for 
the glittering comedienne who is even now re- 
visiting old theaters and old friends the coun- 
try over as the lady elocutionist in "Erstwhile 
Susan." And even then the story would not 
be finished. 

If I had anything to say about it, which 
seems wildly improbable, I am sure the first 
chapter would tell of her appearance in "Mac- 
beth. 5 ' Every once in so often some critic, 
newly impressed by her capacity to represent 
will power incarnate, has been inspired to at 
least a column of which the gist is that he would 
like to see her play "Macbeth," ignoring the 
fact that she did play it once with sensational 
effect, although it must be admitted she was not 
suffered to be the bloody lady of Inverness, but 
was compelled to hide her light as the crowned 
child who rises from the caldron in the black 
and midnight cavern to make the prophecy 
about Great Birnam Wood. By way of pref- 
ace, this child must exclaim : 

Be lion-mettled, proud, and take no care 

Who chafes, who frets or where conspirers are! 

175 



MRS. FISKE 

But, unorthodox even then, she besought him 
to be indifferent to "persipers." She tried this 
new reading at the first performance with de- 
vastating effect, particularly on the Macbeth of 
the evening, no less a person, as it happened, 
than Barry Sullivan. He left the stage a shat- 
tered being, but when the culprit was brought 
before him, he could only roar with laughter at 
the sight of so preposterously diminutive an ac- 
tress and promise forthwith to buy her a lol- 
lypop. And he did buy it. It was probably 
that new and fascinating word which fastened 
that adventure in her memory and so brought 
it in time to us. 

The account of her appearance in 'Tina- 
fore" would have to come later, for the juvenile 
companies which are described in the first chap- 
ter of so many stage biographies found Minnie 
Maddern already a veteran. There would 
have to be a chapter devoted to the time when 
she sang that imperishable opera for a hundred 
performances, if for no other reason than the 
rather startling one that she was not the Jose- 
phine or even the H ebe, but that lowly suitor, 
Ralph Rackstraw. 

One chapter would cover the painful transi- 
176 




, Mrs. Fiske as Tess 



GOING TO THE PLAY 

tion period of her early teens when, at twelve or 
thirteen, she would step boldly forth as Louise 
in "The Two Orphans," perhaps, or as Lucy 
in 'The Streets of New York," and then strug- 
gle during the next week to conceal and nul- 
lify her ambitious legs beneath the short frocks 
of Little Eva. 

In that story old friends of all of us would 
enter for a time and disappear. Ethelbert 
Nevin, Eva Booth, Madame Rejane — who 
knows whom we might not meet? Out in 
Denver, for instance, we would be sure to meet 
Eugene Field, the Eugene Field of the needy 
"Tribune" days when red-haired Minnie Mad- 
dern toured the far West and tried to be just 
as much like Lotta as possible. Then was the 
Tabor Grand in its glory, that celebrated op'ry- 
house where Field saw "Modjesky ez Cameel" 
and even tried to disrupt her performance, Mrs. 
Fiske tells me, by a sepulchral cough of which 
he was inordinately proud. He would prac- 
tise it long and patiently in the open country, 
and then produce it at the theater in all its 
beauty until the ushers dragged him to the 
street. On little Miss Maddern, however, he 
would expend such flattering attention and such 

179 



MRS. FISKE 

horny-handed appreciation that at last she was 
betrayed into coming happily before the cur- 
tain and blushing over a bunch of violets that 
hurtled down at her feet from the Field box. 
She bent to pick them up, and then the happi- 
ness was his, for back they were yanked across 
the footlights. He had tied a string to them. 
Not that she learned enough from that bitter ex- 
perience, for after the engagement, at the fare- 
well dinner they gave her, she was genuinely 
touched when Field made a glowing speech, and 
in behalf of the "gentlemen of the Denver 
press" placed in her hands a handsome jewel- 
case. She made a tremulous little speech of 
acceptance, and then opened the case. Within 
were ear-rings, two of them, each made of glass 
and each the size of a seckel pear. The fury 
at herself for letting them take her in still 
burns. 

"I might have known," she groaned when I 
brought the story to her for verification. "I 
suppose all the 'gentlemen of the Denver press' 
in those days could not have raised ten dollars 
among them." 

Eugene Field, wag and chivalrous comrade, 
passes out of the story in time, but then enters 

180 



GOING TO THE PLAY 

Professor Copeland, the beloved "Copey" of 
Harvard, who has only to intimate that he 
might read a bit of Kipling at the Harvard 
Club to pack to the doors that New York 
gathering-place of his old boys. A formal and 
forbidding biography of Mrs. Fiske might tell 
of the lecture on her art she once delivered — in 
a moment of abstraction, I suspect — from the 
stage of Sanders Theater in Cambridge, but the 
story we are after will tell rather of the time 
she journeyed out there to have tea at the Hollis 
with Professor Copeland. The old "Advo- 
cate" boys still like to tell how they waylaid 
her at the station, bore her in triumph to the 
"Advocate" office, and so lavished their atten- 
tions on her that the afternoon was half spent 
before a stern messenger-boy appeared with a 
note for her. One glance at it, and with over- 
whelming gestures of despair, contrition, and 
farewell, she vanished from their sight. The 
message had fluttered unheeded to the floor. 
It was simply this, brief, but imperious, "Min- 
nie, come over to Copey's." 

We should meet Copeland, then, and Mod- 
jeska and Ellen Terry, and Charles Coghlan 
and Lotta and Janauschek. Not the Lotta of 

181 



MRS. FISKE 

the sixties and seventies, but the Miss Crabtree 
who lives in sedate retirement, and whom Mrs. 
Fiske visits whenever she is in Boston, to come 
away each time filled with wonder at a charm 
and comic spirit that have never flagged. Not 
the Janauschek of the thunderous and bosom- 
beating times, but the kindly Hausfrau who 
used to search her memories of the palmy days 
as she rocked comfortably in the evenings on the 
veranda of Mrs. Fiske's home in New York. 

And if it were left for me to write that story, 
I should certainly want some reference to 
"Fogg's Ferry," the wild Western melodrama 
with which in the early eighties Miss Maddern 
herself came out of the West. Only the other 
day the man who wrote it passed on. It was 
her first appearance in our part of the country 
as a star, and she could not have been more 
than sixteen at the time. Not from her, but 
as a friend of a friend of Frohman's, I learned 
how profound was the impression she made then 
on two young adventurers of the theater who 
crossed her trail in Boston and aspired to place 
her under contract forever and ever. One was 
named Charles Frohman, the other was named 
David Belasco. One evening they met in the 

182 



GOING TO THE PLAY 

lobby of the old Boston Museum and poured 
forth to each other their faith in the new star 
that had shot across the theatrical firmament. 
Soon Frohman became so worked up that he 
borrowed two dollars and hurried away. It is 
not puzzling that he should have had to borrow 
that staggering sum in those lean days, but it 
is a little mysterious that Belasco should have 
had it to lend. With it Frohman made his 
way to a florist's and demanded as fine a bou- 
quet as his funds would buy. Then, with his 
arms full of flowers and his head full of dreams, 
he made for the theater where "Fogg's Ferry" 
was the bill. As he approached the alley lead- 
ing to the stage-door his heart sank at a strange 
apparition. There, entering the same alley, 
with the same token under his arm, was the 
young Belasco. It was too much. The two 
met at the stage-door, each grimly determined 
that his flowers and his offer should go in first. 
A scuffle followed, and soon the stage-hands 
were rushing to the heroine of the story with 
accounts of the pitched battle between her ad- 
mirers. She could not have guessed that the 
fight for her favor was between two who would 
achieve international reputation in the theater 

183 



MRS. FISKE 

of twenty years after. She was merely grati- 
fied, exhilarated, and delighted beyond meas- 
ure by the flowers and the fight. I have never 
been able to learn whose bouquet did pass the 
door first, but I suspect it was Frohman's, for 
thirty years later when hp hobbled back-stage 
at the Hudson Theater while she was play- 
ing there in "The High Road," his first greet- 
ing was, "Did you keep the flowers?" 
Whereat she beamed upon him and held out 
both her hands. 

"O my dear Mr. Frohman," she said, "would 
that I could have !" 

But then, that is just a scrap from a story I 
hope will be written one of these fine days — by 
somebody else. 



184 



VI 

POSTSCRIPT 

SO many actors have entered Mrs. Fiske's 
1 company and come out of it better actors, 
so many youngsters have gone to her for advice 
and come away with a widened vision and re- 
newed inspiration, that there has long been a 
call for some exposition of her "theater wis- 
dom," some expression of the philosophy of one 
who has always been vaguely accounted "the 
most interesting woman on the American stage." 
It would have been a hopeless task to overcome 
her diffidence and preoccupation sufficiently to 
persuade her to write her own treatise; it would 
have been unthinkably out of character for her 
to sign her name to another's screed, as many 
of our players do. There seemed to be no 
other way than for some one who knew her to 
summon his memories of casual and incautious 
conversations, to chronicle her table-talk, 
faintly, but faithfully. That is how the pre- 

185 



MRS. FISKE 

ceding chapters came to be written. If the 
reader has not found them entertaining and 
stimulating, the fault is not Mrs. Fiske's. 

Her sentiments on the repertory idea aroused 
the most debate. I think her position in the 
matter is essentially sound and salutary. She 
would give to each "movement" in the theater, 
to each person with a project, large or small, 
this simple and single ideal — the best possible 
performance of the immediate play in hand. 
Aim for that directly and for that alone. Then 
the training of the actors, the encouragement of 
playwrights, the upbuilding of a responsive pub- 
lic, and the slow formation of a national thea- 
ter will take care of themselves. 

The instinct that the play's the thing has 
given Mrs. Fiske's career its character. The 
Fiske productions make a notable list in the his- 
tory of the American stage, but I like to believe 
it was less the result of a self-conscious, high- 
minded purpose to bestow good things on the 
American public than of a succession of com- 
pelling and disinterested enthusiasms for the 
good plays as they came along. I am sure that 
on the several occasions when Mrs. Fiske ac- 
cepted comparatively unimportant roles in her 

186 



EOSTSCRIPT 

own productions, it was not in any showy mood 
of self-effacement, but because of her absorp- 
tion in the play itself; because she really cared 
about nothing except the immediate objectifica- 
tion of a play she happened to admire. She 
would care a great deal about that, and not 
much about its effect on her personal fame and 
fortune. Therefore when she told me that she 
would guard her health by playing only light 
comedies for the rest of her days, I was not at 
all impressed. If a racking tragedy happened 
to intrigue her to-morrow, I think she would 
plunge into rehearsals before the day was done. 

The most familiar answer to Mrs. Fiske's 
contentions as to repertory is the defense of such 
a theater as a place of experiments, a labora- 
tory for plays. The most familiar example 
cited is the Irish Players and their "Playboy of 
the Western World." Where would the 
"Playboy" have been had it not been for the 
repertory idea? To which, I feel sure, Mrs. 
Fiske would make unabashed answer somewhat 
as follows: 

"Where is it now? Where was it ever? 
What has become of it? Why did it not run 
for half a season in New York? After all, we 

187 



MRS. FISKE 

are not so very rich in great plays. Why had 
it only spasmodic and more or less disorderly 
production? Why has not the great theater- 
going public of America seen it for that pub- 
lic's own welfare? The 'Playboy' has been 
lost because — is it not true? — it was so unfor- 
tunate as to have been born and caught in a 
'movement' — a repertory movement; one of 
the finest and most idealistic, too. So 'The 
Playboy' has been lost to the public of this 
generation unless some first-rate specialist will 
catch it up and give it a straight-f rom-the-shoul- 
der professional presentation. Of course it is 
shameful that a specialist did not do this in 
the first place." 

The best answer, however, to Mrs. Fiske's 
contentions as to repertory is to be found, I 
think, in her own testimony as to the difficulty, 
the tremendous difficulty, of assembling the 
ideal cast, search where you may and spend 
what you will. It is her point that no one 
company, however resourceful, can be adjusted 
to a series of plays as satisfactorily as the sep- 
arate companies a director might assemble for 
each separate play. Yet the finding of the 
ideally appropriate company is no easy task. 

188 



POSTSCRIPT 

Only once in twenty years did the Fiskes ac- 
complish it to her satisfaction. She describes, 
for instance, the perfect cast she contemplated 
for "Rosmersholm 55 and how it escaped her. 
For it is one thing to select the perfect cast, and 
quite another to assemble it when a hundred 
other inclinations and a dozen other contracts 
are working against the idealistic, but baffled, 
director. "A perfectly adequate and success- 
ful stage representation of a play, 55 says Ber- 
nard Shaw, "requires a combination of circum- 
stances so fortunate that I doubt whether it 
has ever occurred in the history of the world. 55 
That is why Mr. Shaw insists on publishing and 
acting (within the brackets) his own pieces, and 
that is why I am not at all sure a well-rounded, 
flexible company would not fit any play as 
well as the special company its producer might 
be able to gather together at any one time in the 
scramble and hubbub of the Rialto. 

Furthermore, I believe that such a fixed com- 
pany, continuing from season to season, is neces- 
sary in order to give a national theater con- 
tinuity in the public mind. Without the mag- 
net of some such favorite and familiar person- 
ality, I think another "Rosmersholm, 55 though 

189 



MRS. FISKE 

superbly played, would not draw the crowds to 
the theater. In 1907 and 1908 "Rosmers- 
holm" did move in majestic triumph across this 
country; but I do not think the people went to 
see "Rosmersholm." I think they went to see 
Mrs. Fiske. 

And speaking of "Rosmersholm," let me 
smuggle in here this letter, which touches on 
her great adventure with that tragedy. Mrs. 
Fiske writes to me : 

I wish I had realized during some one of our many 
idle and pleasant conversations how fully your alarm- 
ingly long memory would reconstruct them for the 
series you have been giving forth in The Century. 
Then in a guilefully casual and studied manner I 
might have let fall a few of the observations I should 
really enjoy making, a few of the things on which I 
should like to free my mind. 

I wish I had taken a little fling at the reckless writ- 
ing that occasionally makes the way harder and more 
discouraging for those who want to do the good things 
in the theater. Let me give you a sample from a 
current magazine, not because it is particularly im- 
portant, but because it happens to be at hand. Some 
one, apropos of America's inhospitality to the loftier 
literature of the theater, has just said I piled up 
heavy losses for my manager with my "tragedies of 
'Hannele' and of 'Rosmersholm,' whose lovers threw 
themselves into the mill-race and committed mill-race- 

190 




Mrs. Fiske as Hannele 



EOSTSCRIPT 

suicide." What else, he asks, could have happened 
where the national idol was to be Charlie Chaplin % 

Now this, as you know, is downright false and it is 
wickedly unfair, or, rather, this sort of thing is wick- 
edly unfair to Ibsen and Hauptmann and America and 
me. As a matter of fact, in half a season "Rosmers- 
holm" made a pleasant profit of forty thousand dol- 
lars. If any one at this late date is to make casual 
reference to "Rosmersholm," I think it would be just 
as well to say the significant thing, and the significant 
thing about "Rosmersholm" is that in the United 
States alone of all countries, in this baby-land of the 
Western world, that most somber tragedy of our time 
achieved a run of nearly two hundred consecutive 
performances at a profit. How wonderful! No- 
where else has it happened. 

As to "Hannele," it was given for only a few per- 
formances in New York and Chicago, but that was 
all that was ever intended. It was purely a labor of 
love. We never dreamed of such an absurd project 
as playing a long season with anything so arduous, so 
hazardous, and so fearfully expensive. It calls for a 
chorus of Heaven knows how many and for a formid- 
able orchestra, parts of the production that could not 
possibly be found outside the biggest cities. "Han- 
nele" was not satisfying, not right, at the Lyceum in 
New York, too small a theater for its essential illu- 
sions. We had no sooner tried it there than we real- 
ized that we had been wrong in declining the invitation 
to present it at the New Theater ; and after ten days, 
instead of the two weeks contemplated, we resumed 
"The Pillars of Society," a popular success, which 

193 



MRS. FISKE 

was the regular bill of the season, whereas "Hannele," 
of course, was just a little something on the side with 
which we were indulging its friends and ourselves. 

Its great beauty, which was only partly revealed at 
the Lyceum and which, nevertheless, won great praise 
from high places, was completely manifest at the 
spacious Grand Opera House in Chicago, where we 
were able to secure parts of the fine Thomas orchestra 
for the lovely music. We gave it for three or four 
special matinees, and it was superb. As a matter of 
fact, I think it about paid for itself ; but even if it did 
not, the distinction it gave the entire engagement- — 
the swell of the wake of it — was of incalculable value 
to us at the time and long afterward, lifting us all to 
a higher level. Though "Hannele" never made 
money, and was not expected to, I think it was prob- 
ably one of the wisest enterprises Mr. Fiske and I ever 
undertook. It had a great and measurable value, as 
any one could have seen who had that mysterious and 
delicate something which, for lack of a clearer phrase, 
I must call the sense of the theater. 

You must have this sense inborn and carefully de- 
veloped if you would do in the theater the less obvi- 
ous and more difficult tasks such as "Rosmersholm" 
and "Hannele." Only so can you stand alone, and 
you must stand alone. You must make your own 
blunders, must cheerfully accept your own mistakes 
as part of the scheme of things. You must not allow 
yourself to be advised, cautioned, influenced, persuaded 
this way and that. If Mr. Fiske and I had listened to 
the kind and earnest advice of those who had our best 
interests at heart, we would have thrown away a won- 

194 



POSTSCRIPT 

derful dramatic property — none other than "Becky 
Sharp." Like many another play that has thrived 
enormously, "Becky," in its first stages, was a gigantic 
failure. We were begged to withdraw it. The 
trouble, every one said, was with the play and with 
my acting. The trouble was not with the play. So 
far as I remember, not a line of it was ever changed 
after the opening night at the old Fifth Avenue. 
The trouble was with me. The trouble was with 
my individual performance, and I knew that immedi- 
ately. A great curiosity, an intense and satisfying in- 
terest in Thackeray, drew crowds to the play from 
the first, but they dispersed gloomy, dissatisfied, omin- 
ous. By the second week the crowds were even larger, 
but by this time they were happy crowds. I tell you 
this little bit of history because it illustrates the fact 
that the producer must be able to detect real failure 
from the beginning. Except in one instance, Mr. 
Fiske and I have recognized our real failures imme- 
diately and made short work of them. 

One beautiful thing we did throw away. This 
was "Lady Betty Martingale" by John Luther Long. 
It had great faults, but they were the kind you could 
remedy in two days. Properly nursed, the play would 
have developed the priceless quality of delicate charm, 
and I think I owe it to Mr. Long to shout this from 
the housetops. All the long faces that hover close 
when success does not immediately perch upon one's 
banner gathered about "Lady Betty Martingale." 
All those who could not see, who could not instantly 
and instinctively reach the psychological root of the 
trouble, closed in upon the play and a beautiful thing 

195 



MRS. FISKE 

was crushed to death and lost to the American 
theater. If you have a sense of the theater \ you can 
rely on that to tell you, and with that reliance wave 
aside the kindly disposed grave-diggers who again 
and again will assemble beside your dearest efforts. 
Among the most disheartening and dangerous of 
these advisers, you will often find those closest to you, 
your dearest friends, members of your own family, 
perhaps, loving, anxious, and knowing nothing what- 
ever about the theater. A beloved aunt implored me 
not to produce "Tess of the d'Urbervilles," and I was 
so young at the time, so far from learning the bitter 
lesson of making my own decisions and obeying my 
own instinct, that I almost yielded to her prayers. 
Yet "Tess" has been the sturdy foundation of all that 
followed, good and bad. There comes to mind as I 
write you a precious bit of advice I received the other 
day during a visit to my dressing-room by a dear 
friend who was all aglow with the enthusiasm of a 
pleasant and inspiring matinee. "Oh, why," she ex- 
claimed, " — why do you not always play comedy !" I 
do not know exactly what she meant. They are dif- 
ficult to follow, these people. Their mental processes, 
as far as the theater is concerned, are unfathomable to 
us of the theater. I might have answered that, much 
as I prefer to play comedy, I could not afford to play it 
all the time for the simple reason that our serious 
dramas have, with two exceptions, always yielded the 
greater reward in money. I might have told her this, 
but I said nothing, and it is better to say nothing. 
Keep your own counsel. Stand alone. Pay no atten- 
tion to those who have not the sense of the theater. 

196 



POSTSCRIPT 

You will not succeed always. That would be ab- 
surd, anyway — absurd and stagnating. But if you do 
not strike immediately the flame that rises to the sky, 
beware your nearest and dearest with their forebodings 
— their dire forebodings. It is perhaps the most tedi- 
ous and boresome part of a stage career, probably of 
all careers. I have never forgotten a visit to my 
dressing-room of one closely related to me. We were 
engaged in giving birth to a play. The process was 
disagreeable in the extreme. It would be difficult to 
imagine anything more outwardly hopeless to one with- 
out the sense of the theater. In this case, however, I 
was quite imperturbable, because I knew it was all 
right. It was quite possible to go out and take a walk 
and think of other things. But my near one asked 
with a wrinkled brow: "Do you like this play?" I 
replied, "I do not like any play we produce, ever, at 
any time." The only possible answer, was it not? 
People without the sense of the theater cannot talk 
about it with sanity. I could not possibly talk of 
painting with an atom of intelligence, and yet how 
blithely people do talk of the theater, and with what 
authority ! 

And then the managers ! For my own part, man- 
agers have been few, and my way has been so strewn 
with roses in that respect that I cannot speak from per- 
sonal experience; but my long life in the theater has 
taught me this prayer : "Deliver me from the small- 
visioned lords of the theater who can be depressed 
when the audience is scanty or frigid, and who the 
very next night will glow and exult in the joy of a 
packed and enthusiastic house!" Such managers are 

197 



MRS. FISKE 

dangerous to a career. They forget that the perform- 
ance may be exactly the same. They are not relying 
on their own sense of failure and success. Probably 
they have none. They are not truly of the theater. 
Let them be gone from it! Away with them! 

The great, substantial, foundation-making careers of 
the stage, the men and women who have kept the in- 
stitution animate as an integral part of the life of the 
people, have been the men and women who stood firm 
at their several posts in that part of the world's do- 
main which is called the theater. Theirs is the power 
and the glory for ever and ever. 

I wish I had told you all this, and I wish, too, that 
I had paid a little tribute to the dramatic critics of 
America. There has ever been a sort of comradeship 
between us, unexpressed, but felt, over a long stretch 
of years. From girlhood I have taken them for what 
they were worth, hail fellow well met, even when we 
never met at all, and they have taken me in the same 
way. Their rebukes have never made me angry, be- 
cause I have always wondered why they did not rebuke 
me more. They should have. Their friendly praise 
has been one of the sweetest, most warming things in 
my life in the theater. I do go on the stage unafraid 
of them and with love in my heart for them. And, 
the country over, I think most of them have a stealthy 
fondness for me. Indeed, they show it all the time. 

Thus Mrs. Fiske. 



198 



VII 

MARIE AUGUSTA DAVEY 

IN this final chapter I submit the outline of a 
long and extraordinarily productive career 
and some remote material assembled for the 
guidance and convenience of the bold fellow 
who may some day undertake "The Life and 
Works of Minnie Maddern Fiske." It is pos- 
sible that some day she herself, in the compara- 
tive leisure of the retirement she contemplates, 
will turn her attention to a volume of reminis- 
cence. But I have my doubts. It would be a 
fascinating thing to read, but it will be hard for 
any publisher to persuade her that many people 
would be interested in a story that does not 
even interest her particularly. I may add in 
an aggrieved tone that the data here presented 
I have gathered without any assistance from 
Mrs. Fiske. 

Mrs. Fiske's life in the theater may be 
roughly divided into four periods : her years as 

199 



MRS. FISKE 

an "infant phenomenon" ; her dashing days as 
a second and lesser Lotta; her reappearance as 
Mrs. Fiske, followed by the richly eventful sea- 
sons of the Manhattan Company; and, finally, 
the present period, which includes such idler 
comedies as "Mrs Bumpstead-Leigh" and "Erst- 
while Susan," the vastly diverting character- 
ization in which, as I write, she is just bringing 
her second season to a close. 

Marie Augusta Davey — for so Mrs. Fiske 
was named on her first appearance in this world 
— was born in New Orleans on December 19, 
1865. Her father and mother were both of the 
theater. They were "show-folks." Tom 
Davey, whose Welsh forebears contributed to 
the Celtic strain in Mrs. Fiske which no one 
can miss, was an actor and theatrical manager 
in the more primitive and more adventurous 
days of the American stage. Lizzie Maddern, 
musician and actress, was one of the three Mad- 
dern sisters who came here from England on 
their father's concert tours. Of these sisters, 
Mary Maddern acted with Mrs. Fiske until 
recently; while Emma Maddern, also an act- 
ress in many of Davey' s ventures, became Mrs. 
Stevens, and it is her brilliant daughter, Emily 

200 



MARIE AUGUSTA DAVEY 

Stevens, whose continuation of the Maddern 
look and voice and manner inspires to this day 
the frequent and probably infuriating sugges- 
tion that she imitates her distinguished cousin. 
So Mrs. Fiske was a born actress in more 
senses than one. She came of a stage family 
as unmistakably as did the Barrymores, the 
Terrys, or, for that matter, the Crummleses. 
That would seem to be the best way to go about 
the business. A thoughtful study of the lives 
of the players must lead us all to advise stage 
aspirants to have for a grandmother a distin- 
guished actress and at least one aunt and an 
uncle or two dedicated to the theater. It is 
customary to speak of Mrs. Fiske's first appear- 
ance as having taken place at Little Rock as 
the Duke of Tork in "Richard III," but that 
was probably merely her first considerable role. 
Just as Maude Adams began her career at the 
age of nine months when she was carried on, out 
in Salt Lake City, on a platter, so, in the thea- 
ters down the Mississippi, Mrs. Fiske must have 
had such easy roles as could be filled by any 
actress who was "the type." It would be safest 
to say that she wandered on the stage, a walking 
lady who appeared before the footlights as soon 

201 



MRS. FISKE 

as she could walk, and was intrusted with speak- 
ing parts as soon as she could talk. 

Minnie Maddern had long since put the 
nursery behind her when at the age of four she 
made her debut in New York. If you will 
turn to the newspapers of May 30, 1870, you 
will find in the advertisement of the old Thea- 
tre Frangais in Fourteenth Street the notice of 
"A Sheep in Wolfs Clothing/' with Carlotta 
Leclercq, and the announcement in capitals — 
in prophetic capitals — that that evening would 
introduce "little minnie maddern, her 

FIRST APPEARANCE ON ANY STAGE." Of 

course it was nothing of the sort, but then this 
was a theatrical advertisement. Just as the 
photographs of the alert and perky Minnie 
Maddern of those days look preposterously like 
the Mrs. Fiske of to-day, so the reviews in the 
papers the next day suggest that something of 
the same style and quality manifested itself 
even then. 

"Prodigies are not apt to be objects of pleas- 
ing contemplation to a healthy mind," The 
World observed, "but this Miss Minnie Mad- 
dern is made a prodigy by the absence of any- 
thing prodigious about her performance, and 

202 



MARIE AUGUSTA DAVEY 

her acting is entirely unexceptionable." The 
Times, which began to be rapturous about Mrs. 
Fiske when she was four, described her as "the 
first infant actress we remember whose efforts 
do not relish of the familiar mechanism of word 
and manner/' "Her knowledge of stage busi- 
ness, her general carriage and the careful deliv- 
ery of her lines throughout the play, were re- 
markable for a child of her years/ 3 Laurence 
Hutton wrote afterwards, "and hers was one of 
the most satisfactory representations in the 
piece." 

Far more glowing were the accounts which 
followed her next important role in New York 
when, some four years later, Minnie Maddern 
was cast as 'Prince Arthur in a distinguished re- 
vival of "King John" at Booth's Theater. 
Agnes Booth, who was the Queen Constance 
of that production, used to stand in the wings 
and listen to the grief-charged voice of an eight- 
year-old girl, so that from it she might take the 
key and the tone for her own scenes to come. 

During this period Minnie Maddern, as she 
was called on all the programs from the first, 
played with many notables of the stage. So 
she sat on Jefferson's knee as Meenie, or, as 

203 



MRS. FISKE 

Hendricks laboriously spelled out the sinister 
deed of Derrick for the enlightenment of the 
befuddled Rip. So she basked in the radiance 
of Mary Anderson, and steadied herself amid 
the thunder of John McCullough, and dropped 
off to sleep to the crooning music of J. K. 
Emmet. Here is a fairly complete list of the 
parts that fell to her : 

Duke of York in "Richard III." 

Willie Lee in "Hunted Down." 

Prince Arthur in "King John." 

The crowned child in "Macbeth." 

Damon's son in "Damon and Pythias." 

Little Fritz in "Fritz, Our German Cousin." 

Paul in "The Octoroon." 

Franko in "Guy Mannering." 

Sybil in "A Sheep in Wolf's Clothing." 

Mary Morgan in "Ten Nights in a Barroom." 

The child in "Across the Continent." 

The boy in "Bosom Friends." 

Alfred in "Divorce." 

Lucy Fairweather in "The Streets of New York." 

The gamin and Peachblossom in "Under the Gas- 

light." _ 

Marjorie in "The Rough Diamond." 
The Child in "The Little Rebel." 
Adrienne in "Monsieur Alphonse." 
Georgie in "Frou-frou." 
Hendrick and Meenie in "Rip Van Winkle." 

204 




" Mrs. Fiske at four, a year after her debut 
on the stage 



MARIE AUGUSTA DAVEY 

Eva in "Uncle Tom's Cabin." 

Dollie in "Chicago Before the Fire." 

Hilda in "Karl and Hilda." 

Ralph Rackstraw in "Pinafore.*" 

Clip in "A Messenger from Jarvis Section." 

The Sun God in "The Ice Witch." 

Frangois in "Richelieu." 

Louise in "The Two Orphans." 

The Widow Melnotte in "The Lady of Lyons." 

To say nothing of miscellaneous children and 
fairies in "Aladdin," "The White Fawn" and 
other spectacular pieces. In looking over this 
formidable list, you may be struck by the great 
variety of the parts, and it is an extraordinary 
thing that Minnie Maddern, who was an ab- 
surdly tiny morsel of an actress, should ever 
have had the opportunity to play the grown-up 
parts. Yet such was the economy of those 
makeshift days that she can remember going on 
as the Widow Melnotte when she was twelve, 
and taking to romances when she was thirteen 
and fourteen. When she was thirteen she was 
touring alone, an unabashed free-lance in the 
catch-as-catch-can, barn-storming theater of a 
day gone by. 

It should be remembered, too, that the long 
run, as we know it, had not yet come into exist- 

207 



MRS. FISKE 

ence, and that many of the roles she assumed 
were for a few weeks, a week, sometimes only 
for a night. For example, the Daveys might 
be quartered for a season in some Ohio city, 
where their daughter would go to the convent 
school just like the child across the street except 
for the occasions when some visiting star would 
need a child for some piece in his repertory. 
Obviously her schooling must have been fugitive 
and lacking that fine, serene continuity on which 
educators set such store ; so it is quite the thing 
for commentators on Mrs. Fiske to roll their 
eyes and speak wonderingly of the qualities of 
mind and taste her works have borne witness to 
and her whole being revealed. Yet it is not 
apparent that the kind of childhood she knew 
is not quite as stimulating as the more conven- 
tional routine of learning that two and two 
make four and memorizing the exports, mineral 
resources, manners, and customs of Bolivia. 
Certainly those who enter the theater early are 
likely in maturity to be the least stagy. To 
them it has never been a glamorous adventure. 
To them it is as natural as life itself, as much a 
matter of course as the air we all breathe, as 
little subject for corrupting thought as the blue 

208 



MARIE AUGUSTA DAVEY 

sky we all take for granted. And they are the 
aristocrats of the theater. 

With the production of "Fogg's Ferry" at 
Abbey's Park Theater on May 15, 1882, we 
enter upon the second period of Mrs. Fiske's 
career, when she put away childish roles and 
went in for rough comedy and romances. It 
was her debut as a star in New York, and she 
was just sixteen. Turn once more to the yel- 
lowing newspapers, and in the New York jour- 
nals of that date you will see an advertisement 
such as this : 



FIRST APPEARANCE OF THE CHARMING YOUNG 
COMEDIENNE 

MISS MINNIE MADDERN 

as Chip in 
"FOGG'S FERRY" 

Charles E. Callahan's romantic comedy-drama 

of human love and passion. 

Illustrated by a strong company with 

picturesque scenery and magnificent 

effects. 



The next reviews were full of nice things 
about the new star, but the play received short 

209 



MRS. FISKE 

shrift. It is amusing to think that the great 
actress of Ibsen roles and the unequaled expon- 
ent of such high comedy as "Becky Sharp" and 
"The New York Idea" should have had to start 
forth under the handicap of having the Even- 
ing Post laud her "winning, childlike, innocent 
manner" and commend her for being "frolic- 
some and vivacious without being vulgar." It 
is only with a struggle that you can realize it 
was of our Mrs. Fiske The Sun was speaking 
when it gave this account of the premiere of 
"Fogg's Ferry" : 

There has been a good deal of indiscreet and reck- 
less writing put forth about Minnie Maddern and 
her dramatic gifts, but she triumphed bravely last 
evening over pamphlets, paragraphs, bouquets, and 
friends, and won the genuine good will of her audience. 
She came forward like a new Lotta, young, slender, 
sprightly, quite pretty, arch of manner, rash in the 
matter of her stockings, as Lotta always was, and pos- 
sessed of undeniable red hair. She had not been on 
the stage a minute before she had jumped under most 
perilous conditions to a seat on the edge of a table and 
established with the audience relations of the most 
agreeable intimacy. Her self-possession is complete. 
She can sing even worse than Lotta can ; but she has a 
native gift and disposition to her calling that will not 
be denied expression and which, if afforded any occa- 

210 




Minnie Maddern at sixteen 



MARIE AUGUSTA DAVEY 

sion of growth and development, cannot fail to make 
her a thoroughly popular artist in her line of small 
comedy. She made a better impression than has been 
made by any debutante in years, in spite of unusual 
difficulties that she had to encounter. 

Indeed, the contrast between this beginning 
and what followed in later years is so diverting 
that there must be room found here for some 
account of "Fogg's Ferry." You can obtain a 
faint impression of its quality from this resume, 
which appeared in The Herald: 

It opens delightfully with a view of Western domes- 
tic felicity in the picture of the home of Fogg, the 
ferryman, in which most of the family are drunk or 
gradually getting drunk on the private stock of a vis- 
itor to the family, Bruce Rawdon, the villain of the 
piece, who has come to court Chip, the ferryman's 
daughter. It may be incidentally remarked that the 
ferry business must be exceedingly unremunerative in 
that part of the country for in a landscape stretching 
off apparently hundreds of miles, the artist has not 
provided a sign of the presence of man, woman, child 
or beast or a place of habitation on mountain or in 
valley. Gerald White, the goody-goody man of the 
play, also turns up in the vast wilderness with matri- 
monial intentions toward Chip, who is dressed so as to 
appear to be about ten or twelve years old. The sense 
of propriety in the audience is satisfied, however, by 
Chip stating that she is sixteen years old, although she 

213 



MRS. FISKE 

wears her dresses cut to her knee. The two men have 
at each other and Chip prevents a murder, and then, 
after mild courtship on the part of all three, Chip an- 
nounces that she has curious dreams, not traceable to 
indigestion, which give her an idea she was as an in- 
fant changed in her cradle. She "feels she is a lady" 
and asks the gentlemen if they don't feel she is right? 
There being no opposition, the question is declared 
carried unanimously and the curtain goes down. In 
act second Chip is found at Judge Somebody's house, 
where she is governess or maid or something else un- 
explained. The two men are there ah-o, still matri- 
monially inclined, but one of them is wooing Blanche, 
the proud and haughty daughter of the Judge. Here 
it is clear to the audience that Blanche was the other 
baby with whom Chip was mixed up: but none but 
the audience know it. Some private papers in the 
Judge's safe are sought by the villain of the piece, who 
wants to get them and then marry Blanche, and Chip is 
accused of the theft and dismissed the house. In act 
third the two men turn up, again still matrimonially 
inclined, and the villain proposes to get more of the 
Judge's papers by blowing up a steamer about to pass, 
and on which the Judge is traveling with a load of 
bonds and wills and other family valuables. Chip 
overhears it all and saves the steamer by firing a pocket 
pistol into the waters and exploding a dynamite mine 
securely hidden on the bed of the river by piercing the 
iron cylinder with the ball. After this impossible ex- 
ploit, the play very properly begins its natural dis- 
solution. In act four we find Chip in the Judge's 
home in an elaborate costume of embroidered satin and 

214 



MARIE AUGUSTA DAVEY 

silk cut in the latest Paris fashion; we find her the 
acknowledged daughter, while the proud and 
haughty Blanche is dismissed the house ; Chip marries 
the man of her choice and villainy generally being pun- 
ished and virtue rewarded, the curtain falls. Then 
everybody got up and said it was a very much involved 
and poor play but that Miss Maddern was quite good. 
And they were right. 

I have expanded thus on the sparsely chron- 
icled periods of Mrs. Fiske's career not from 
any notion that what she airily dismisses as her 
"pre-historic" days were comparatively im- 
portant, but for two other reasons. The detail 
of her seasons as Minnie Maddern is less acces- 
sible, less familiar to the present generation of 
theatergoers. Then, too, I think it is interest- 
ing, suggestive, and heartening that "Fogg's 
Ferry" should have prepared for "Rosmers- 
holm," that out of such rough-and-ready begin- 
nings her quality both as an artist and as a 
commander of dramatic endeavor should have 
emerged in gradual beauty and significance 
until she should one day stand as the loftiest 
artist on the American stage. 

Even when "Fogg's Ferry" came to town 
some one on The Tribune, William Winter pre- 
sumably, hailed her while scarcely more than a 

215 



MRS. FISKE 

child, "as one of the brightest and most inter- 
esting girls that have appeared upon the stage," 
but the more truly prophetic appreciation of 
the Mrs. Fiske of yesterday and to-day began 
to come a few seasons later with her appearance 
in "In Spite of All," an adaptation Steele 
Mackaye made from the "Andrea" of Sardou 
fits and presented at his Lyceum in 1885. I 
remember Mrs. Fiske's once laughing gaily at 
her own youthful recklessness in connection 
with "In Spite of All." 

"I think the limit was reached," she said, 
"when I had the impudence to stroll out and 
engage a company comprising Eben Plympton, 
John Lane (then prominent), Richard Mans- 
field (who had already had his triumph in 'The 
Parisian Romance'), and Selina Dolaro (very 
celebrated at that time). They all 'supported' 
me at the old Lyceum, and they were superb. 
I was perfectly dreadful, really. Mr. Mans- 
field and I got on very well, although my 
carelessness in dress annoyed him very much 
and he frequently remonstrated with me in the 
kindliest way." 

Yet it was after "In Spite of All" that The 
Times hailed Miss Maddern as probably "the 

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MARIE AUGUSTA DAVEY 

most interesting young actress on the American 
stage. She has many artistic faults, but, on 
the other hand, she has keen intelligence, a 
style, so far as it has been formulated, wholly 
her own, unlike that of any other player and 
entirely free from conventionality, and a most 
charming personality, which attracts the sym- 
pathy and admiration of all classes of play- 
goers/ 5 

"Without the endowment of beauty, ungif ted 
by the stage presence demanded by the popu- 
lace, lacking breadth of figure and force of per- 
sonality, she nevertheless manages," The World 
observed, "by the rarest of all gifts to seize, 
by some inexplicable faculty of her own, upon 
the sensibility of her auditors and to do the 
most marvelously subtle, tender and pensive 
bits of acting which it has ever been our good 
fortune to witness." 

About this time must have begun that com- 
munity of enthusiasm which has grown with 
the passing years, but which never has em- 
braced and never could embrace all the theater- 
goers of America. It could never have been 
said of her, as it has been said of one of her sis- 
ter stars, that she was "the most valuable the- 

219 



MRS. FISKE 

atrical property in America." You might as 
soon expect Whistler, Debussy, and Meredith 
to be generally popular as to expect a general 
acceptance of the idiom of Minnie Maddern 
Fiske. 

A comparison with such distinctive artists is 
inevitable. She is wont, in her own casual 
analogies between the art of the actor and other 
arts, to make free use of Paderewski, and I 
think most of her admirers would see a kinship 
between them. Certainly when they first 
glimpsed the splendors of her art in her later 
years they must have felt something as the 
Gilders did when they first heard the great 
pianist. Richard Watson Gilder wrote to his 
wife : 

Paderewski ! Well, you have a treat in store ! He 
is quite by himself — reminding me of no one but the 
young Swinburne! His genius is altogether individ- 
ual, and if the individuality appeals, fascinating. It 
appealed to me immensely. He is not sublime, but 
most intensely poetic; his touch is delicacy itself in 
the tender parts — fairy-like; almost sharp, certainly 
charmingly crisp and at times, powerful; there is a 
quiet alertness, like some queer new animal, sure of his 
prey. The hit of his playing was that minuet of his 
that Aus der Ohe plays. He played it very differently 

220 



MARIE AUGUSTA DAVEY 

— in a way to excite you more, with his quick, strange 
touch and tempo, though she plays it exquisitely. 

Indeed, the analogy satisfies me so enor- 
mously that I must clip still another paragraph 
from a letter from Mrs. Gilder to Mary Hal- 
lock Foote. She wrote: 

Paderewski is one of the most extraordinary expe- 
riences in our lives. He is not at all like Rubenstein, 
who is like an ocean, and one of the greatest of the 
great, but in his way as intense an individuality. He 
is a little like Modjeska, so noble, persuasive, delicate, 
firm; and the most artistic creature imaginable, all 
nerves and sinew, but the body subordinate to the 
spirit — always. A wonderful intelligence which some 
artists, actors and especially musicians (above all vir- 
tuosi) lack. 

In her days as a star, Minnie Maddern 
played these roles: 

Juanita in "Juanita," by Charles Callahan. 
Chip in "Fogg's Ferry," by Charles Callahan. 
The leading role in "The Puritan Maid," by Ver 

Planck and Devereaux. 

The leading role in "The Storm Child." 

The leading role in "The Child Wife." 

The leading role in "The Professional Beauty" by 

Ver Planck and Devereux. 

The leading role in "Lady Jemima." 
Mila in "Mila, Queen of the Natchez." 
221 



MRS. FISKE 

Mercy Baxter in "Caprice," by Howard P. Taylor. 
Alice Glendinning in "In Spite of All," adapted by 
Steel Mackaye from Sardou's "Andrea." 
Mrs. Coney in "Featherbrain." 

In 1890 she was married to Harrison Grey 
Fiske, — it was her second marriage, — and, as 
Mrs. Fiske, she retired from the stage. As 
Mrs. Fiske she came back four years later. 
When she returned, it was as an actress of new 
power and new quality, a director of new ambi- 
tion and distinction. The line of cleavage 
between the two careers is marked by more than 
the four years of rest and study, indicated by 
more than the mere change of name, although, 
in dropping the somewhat jaunty "Minnie 
Maddern " for the more imposing " Mrs. 
Fiske," she did add to her achievements the al- 
most unparalleled one of making two separate 
reputations under different names. A list of 
her performances as Mrs. Fiske recalls some of 
the finest work our stage has known and for the 
most part this list of the discerning, ambitious, 
high-minded, painstaking, trail-blazing produc- 
tions made by the Fiskes constitutes a record 
that has seldom been approached in the Ameri- 
can theater. Here it is : 

222 




Minnie Maddern shortly before her retirement from the stage 



MARIE AUGUSTA DAVEY 

Hester Crewe in "Hester Crewe," by Harrison Grey 
Fiske, 1893. 

Mane Deloche in "The Queen of Liars," adapted 
from the French by Harrison Grey Fiske, 1895. 

Nora in "A Doll's House," by Henrik Ibsen, 1895. 

Toinette in "A Light from St. Agnes," one-act play 
by Mrs. Fiske, 1895. 

Cesarine in "La Femme de Claude," by Dumas, 
fils, 1896. 

Cyprienne in "Divorgons," as adapted by Harrison 
Grey Fiske, 1896. 

Madeleine in "Love Finds the Way," adaptation by 
Marguerite Merrington, 1896. 

Adelaide in "Not Guilty," one-act play by Mrs. 
Fiske, 1896. 

The Little Marquis in "The White Pink," adapted 
from the French by Harrison Grey Fiske, 1896. 

Tess in "Tess of the d'Urbervilles," a dramatiza- 
tion by Lorrimer Stoddard, 1897. 

Giulia in "Little Italy," one-act play by Horace B. 
Fry, 1898. 

Saucers in "A Bit of Old Chelsea," one-act play by 
Mrs. Oscar Ber ringer, 1898. 

Magda in "Magda," by Hermann Sudermann, 1899. 

Gilberte in "Frou-frou," adapted by Harrison Grey 
Fiske, 1899. 

Becky in "Becky Sharp," a dramatization by Lang- 
don Mitchell, 1899. 

Miranda in "Miranda of the Balcony," a dramatiza- 
tion by Anne Crawford Flexner, 1901. 

Mrs. Hatch in "The Unwelcome Mrs. Hatch," by 
Mrs. Burton Harrison, 1901. 

225 



MRS. FISKE 

Mary in "Mary of Magdala," William Winter's 
English version of Heyse's play, 1902. 

Hedda in "Hedda Gabler," by Henrik Ibsen, 1903. 
• Leah in "Leah Kleschna," by C. M. S. McClellan, 
1904. 

Cynthia Karslake in "The New York Idea," by 
Langdon Mitchell, 1906. 

Dolce in "Dolce," by John Luther Long, 1906. 

Rebecca West in "Rosmersholm," by Henrik Ibsen, 
1907. 

Nell Sanders in "Salvation Nell," by Edward Shel- 
don, 1908. 

Lona Hessel in "Pillars of Society," by Henrik Ib- 
sen, 1910. 

Hannele in "Hannele," by Gerhart Hauptmann, 
1910. 

Delia Bumps tead-Leigh in "Mrs. Bumpstead- 
Leigh," by Harry James Smith, 1911. 

Agnes Bromley in "The New Marriage," by Lang- 
don Mitchell, 1911. 

Julia France in "Julia France," by Gertrude Ather- 
ton, 1912. 

Lady Patricia Cosway in "Lady Patricia," by Ru- 
dolph Besier, 1912. 

Mary Page in "The High Road," by Edward Shel- 
don, 1912. 

Lady Betty in "Lady Betty Martingale: or the 
Adventures of a Lively Hussy," by John Luther Long, 
1914. 

Juliet Miller in "Erstwhile Susan," by Marian de 
Forest, 1916. 

226 



MARIE AUGUSTA DAVEY 

These plays and her performance in them are 
part of the richest experiences of the present 
generation of theater-goers in this country. 
Their selection for the most part, and her play- 
ing in them always, might be studied and in- 
terpreted as a continuous quest for truth. 
Emerging in the first maturity of her powers 
at the first flowering of the modern drama, Mrs. 
Fiske instinctively and surely identified herself 
with the best that was awaking in the theater 
of Europe and America. With the production 
of "Tess" she came into her own. Her Tess 
with its tragic, fateful power; her Becky, with 
its resourceful and gleaming comedy; her 
pathetic and ennobling Nell, are among the 
unforgetable things alongside Ada Rehan's 
Katharine and the Hamlet of Forbes-Robert- 
son. 

This chapter does not pretend to rehearse 
their manifold excellence or to elaborate any 
appreciation of her qualities as an actress. But 
this is the last chapter, and I can close no book 
on Mrs. Fiske without speaking of those elec- 
trifying moments of hers, those thrilling, mo- 
tionless silences which, though her wonderful 
voice has ever been a delight to me, have sur- 

227 



MRS. FISKE 

passed in beauty and inspiration all my ex- 
periences in the theater. I can see her now as 
poor bedraggled Nell, sitting on the floor of the 
dismal saloon in Cherry Hill, holding her be- 
sotted lover's head in her lap, an unforgetable 
vision of dumb grief that transfixed us all. 
"Ah, to be able to do nothing like that !" Mary 
Garden exclaimed, and put her finger on Mrs. 
Fiske's secret — -the secret that only she knows 
in our time. I can see her as she sat in the 
circle of women listening to the confession 
which Lona's will had won from the Consul, 
and feel even now the warming glow of a 
triumph which indescribably irradiated her. It 
was the outgiving of a dynamic being, an in- 
spirational, communicable emanation, a trans- 
cendent expression of the spirit. This, it seems 
to me, is acting in its highest estate, and this, 
I think, is the genius of Mrs. Fiske. 

I told her once that her performance as Lona 
in "The Pillars of Society" was the finest acting 
I had ever seen. She smiled her thanks, but 
eyed me critically. Had I seen her play Hedda 
Gabler? No, I had not. 

"Ah," she replied, "then you do not know 
228 



MARIE AUGUSTA DAVEY 

how well I can act. And did you ever see 
Duse?" 

"No," I made answer, somewhat crestfallen. 
"Ho! ho! Then what do you know about 
acting?" said Mrs. Fiske. 



THE END 



229 



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